Burning Paradise

11

_{JORDAN LANDING, ILLINOIS}

“I’M NOT WHAT SHE SAID I AM,” THOMAS insisted. “I’m not useless.”

Sitting across from him at a table in the diner, Cassie was inclined to believe it. Not for the first time, Thomas had surprised her.

“Well, look who’s back for supper,” the waitress had said when they came in. “We close at seven,” she added, “so don’t dawdle. Fireworks start at eight—I guess you decided to stay for the fireworks?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Cassie said. Maybe it had been a mistake to come back to the same restaurant where they had bought breakfast. Being recognized was never good. But most of Jordan Landing’s restaurants had already closed for Armistice Day, and the other exception, a Chinese restaurant called Lucky Paradise, didn’t appeal to Thomas.

The waitress brought meatloaf for Cassie and a hamburger and French fries for Thomas. Thomas tucked in eagerly. His appetite seemed to have come back, despite the trauma of the last few days. It was almost as if Beth’s insult had invigorated him.

Once they had retrieved the papers and the key from Werner Beck’s hidden safe, they left the house by the rear door, hiked through a wooded allotment to another quiet residential street, then circled past the commercial section of town to the motel. Back in their room, Leo insisted on reading the papers his father had left him before he would discuss the contents. When he finished, he looked up and said, “We have to think about what happens next.”

“You could start,” Beth suggested, “by telling us what’s in those pages.”

“Well… lots,” Leo said. “It’s sort of a plan.”

“A plan for what?”

“My father wrote this and left it where I could find it in case there was another attack on the Society. Over the last few years he learned some things he didn’t share, things about the hypercolony. Ways we might be able to affect it. Hurt it.”

“Like?”

Leo shook his head: “I need to go through it again. But what I can tell you is, if we do what my father wants us to do, it’s going to be dangerous. You might not want to get involved.”

Beth rolled her eyes. “Fuck, Leo—I am involved.”

“I know, and you’re right, but we’re talking about a whole other level of commitment. I need a decision from you, too,” addressing this to Cassie, “you and Thomas both. And even if you want to join in… I’m going to have to think about whether it’s a good idea to let you do that.”

Cassie felt a twinge of foreboding. Something about the expression on Leo’s face, the pinched V of his brows: what ever was in those papers had frightened him, but it had also filled him with a kind of grim hope.

Beth remained sourly suspicious. “Are you even considering taking them along? Why? If this is so fucking dangerous. I mean, no offence,” a brief and insincere glance at Cassie, “but they’re baggage. She hasn’t done anything more useful than pay for a few meals, and as for Thomas, he’s a kid—he’s useless.”

Cassie flushed at the injustice of it (as if Beth had performed some invaluable service!), but before she could answer Thomas piped up: “I’m not useless.”

“No?” A glimmer of cruelty in Beth’s voice. “What have you done except sleep? Sleep and occasionally cry?”

“Nothing—”

“Right.”

“Nothing except what you guys asked me to do. I don’t try to have things my own way. I don’t complain.” He added, his eyes fixed on Beth: “And I didn’t try to phone anybody.”

Beth reddened and lunged forward—Cassie stepped in front of her brother—but Leo put a hand on Beth’s shoulder to hold her back. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s talk about this.”

Meaning he wanted to talk to Beth alone. So Cassie grabbed her jacket and Thomas’s and left the room with Thomas in tow. She said she’d find dinner and be back by nine.

After the meal—the waitress hurried them out so she could close up “before the fun starts”—Cassie took her brother by the hand and walked with him to the park at the center of town.

Henry Wallace Park, named for the former president, extended from the town hall on the north to the central post office on the south, and it was already filling with people. The park was pretty, Cassie thought, in a modest way—though probably at its best in summer, when the chinkapin oaks would be in full leaf and the air rich with the scent of mown grass. To night the skeletal limbs of the tree and the fading sunset created an atmosphere more somber than the mood of the crowd. But that wasn’t surprising. Armistice Day, ever since it had subsumed Thanksgiving as the nation’s end-of-November holiday, had always been about defying the first chill of winter, even here in relatively balmy southern Illinois. Colored lanterns had been strung around the bandbox. Behind a cluster of picnic tables, cheerful men in flannel shirts and gaudy aprons dispensed hot dogs from a smoking grill. A banner over the bandstand announced 1914—ARMISTICE—2014, and a group of children in school uniforms waved laurel-wreath flags.

Since 2007 Cassie had felt ambivalent about Armistice Day. Her high-school history classes had seemed overlaid with an invisible (and literally unspeakable) irony. Of course, the “century of peace and progress” hadn’t been as peaceful as everyone liked to pretend. It was true that the Great War with all its horrors had served as midwife to the Benelux Pact, the European Coal and Steel Alliance, the Treaty of Rome—all those dull but worthy defenses against war, along with generations of European statesmen whose names Cassie would forever associate with the smell of chalk dust and pencil shavings: Lord Lansdowne, René Plevin, Benedetto Croce. But there had been the Russian civil war, which had simmered hot and cold for almost a decade before the Smallholders Party finally unseated that nation’s creaking, brutal monarchy. There had been the countless border disputes that always threatened to erupt into something worse—Trieste, the Saarland, the Sudetenland. The ethnic “cleansings” that had persisted even after the European Accord on Human Rights. And even as the nations of Europe settled into the detente of the 1930s and 1940s, their reluctant retreat from empire had sparked countless Asian and African rebellions. It had been the Century of Peace only by contrast with what had gone before.

But under all that was the unmentionable truth about the hypercolony. In her last year of school Cassie had written an essay about the social and political movements of pre-Armistice Europe, and she had been impressed by the arrogance with which certain famous men (Hegel, Marx, Treitschke) had claimed the mandate of history—a word they often capitalized, as if history were a physical force, as predictable and as irresistible as the tides. The twentieth century knew better. At least that was what the textbooks said. The twentieth century had discarded the naïve idea that history had a built-in destination.

But history was exactly what the hypercolony had hijacked. It had grasped the raw and bloody meat of human history and shaped it to its own ends. What ever those ends might be.

The park was getting too crowded for Cassie’s comfort. She led Thomas across the street to the post-office grounds, a broad swale of grass where they could sit unobserved and watch the fireworks. The sky was dark now, the first stars beginning to glimmer. Thomas shivered and leaned into Cassie’s shoulder. “What do you think?” she asked, her own thoughts still wandering. “Do you trust him?”

“Trust who?”

“Leo.”

Thomas pondered the question. Cassie liked this about her brother, that he was seldom quick to answer. Her own impulsiveness had gained her a reputation for being bright, while Thomas’s reticence made some people think he was slow—but neither impression was really correct. Sometimes Cassie spoke without thinking. And her brother, she suspected, often thought without speaking.

“Depends,” Thomas said at last. “He’s not mean. He thinks ahead. But that doesn’t mean he’s always right. Like when… you know.”

“When he shot that man,” Cassie supplied.

“Uh-huh.”

“Yeah, well… I’m sorry you had to see that.”

“Why shouldn’t I see it?”

Because knowing the truth doesn’t always make you stronger. “Because you’re twelve years old, for God’s sake.”

“But I need to get used to it.”

“Used to what? People being killed? That’s a horrifying thought!”

Thomas gave her a hard look. “You don’t think it’ll happen again? I know Leo thought the guy was a sim. He never meant to kill a real person. But the Park Service man? Beth could have cracked his skull. Maybe that’s what she meant to do. He could have died. Maybe he died anyway—we don’t know.”

“We can’t let ourselves get caught. If that happens, we lose, nobody wins.”

“I didn’t say it was wrong. All I’m saying is, it could happen again. That or something like it. Probably will happen again, if we do what ever it is Leo wants us to do.”

“Well…” She couldn’t honestly deny it. “Maybe.”

“Back in Buffalo, back when all I had to do was get up in the morning and go to school, maybe it mattered that I’m twelve years old. But it doesn’t matter to the sims. It doesn’t matter to the hypercolony. I don’t want to be protected, Cassie. I want to fight.”

Thomas was a pudgy child and about as belligerent as a Quaker. He tended to cringe in the face of an argument. But the expression on his face was fierce now, almost steely. He did want to fight.

He said, “I guess this is what it was like when—”

The fireworks interrupted him. A rocket sizzled up from the park and burst into a brocade of silver stars. The noise echoed from the quarried stone of the post office building, a sound as hard as a fist.

“What it was like when people went off to war,” Thomas finished. “The big war, I mean.”

Cassie had seen pictures in textbooks, of ranks of men in brown uniforms with rifles slung over their shoulders: the Allied Expeditionary Force, off to join the battered Brits and French. And pictures of the muddy European trenches: Ypres, Passchendaele, the Marne, where countless young men had been slaughtered by other young men as bewildered and obedient as themselves.

“Leo’s not perfect,” Thomas said. “But who is? His father knows a lot, and his father trusts him. So yes. I guess I trust him. Do you trust him?”

On what terms? To make a decision and follow it to the necessary conclusion? To embrace even violence, if violence was necessary? To go to war?

Cassie surprised herself by nodding. “I do,” she said.

And in the end, what choice did she have? As recently as a few days ago she might have considered accepting the burden and promise of anonymity, might have been willing to settle for a circumspect, hidden life.

But she was a criminal now, an accessory to murder. The authorities knew of at least one death. If the Park Service man had died, he would be the second victim… and if he hadn’t died he would almost certainly have given the police a description of Leo, Cassie and Thomas. Local and regional police routinely shared reports by radio and fax, which meant those descriptions would have been available to the hypercolony, which meant it wasn’t only the authorities who might be paying attention. “Anonymity” was no longer an option.

The fireworks display began to build toward a climax, to the loud approval of the crowd in the park. Thomas watched gravely. The rocket’s red glare, Cassie thought. Rockets: a war technology, drafted into the service of celebrating peace. Some members of the Correspondence Society had once believed that larger and more powerful rockets could be used to send scientific instruments (or even human beings!) into orbit around the Earth—or farther, as in the science fiction novels she occasionally liked to read. But the building of rockets bigger than toys had been prohibited in the disarmament protocols that followed the signing of the Armistice. And maybe that, too, was the work of the hypercolony: the hive defending its high-altitude territory.

The air grew sulfurous with the reek of burning black powder. Mindful of the time, Cassie stood and brushed brown grass off her jeans as the band in the park struck up “God Bless America.” She led Thomas away from the park, approaching the motel from the treed north side of the street, and she was glad she had taken that precaution: a cycling blue glow visible from a block away turned out to be the emergency lights of two police cars, parked outside the wing of the motel where she had left Beth and Leo a few hours earlier.

Thomas had steadfastly refused to hold her hand on the walk back, but he reached for her hand now, and Cassie tugged him into the shadow of the trees where she was fairly certain they couldn’t be seen. The presence of the police could only mean that their descriptions had already been broadcast and that someone—the waitress at the restaurant, maybe, or the desk clerk at the motel—had recognized them and alerted the authorities. And if Leo and Beth had already been arrested—

But a voice called her name, startling her, and she turned to find Leo and Beth sharing the darkness of this stand of oaks.

“We saw the cops pull into the lot,” Leo said. “We left by the fire door. I have the stuff my father left me. But most of our luggage is still in there. Some of our ID. And most of our cash, except for whatever you’re carrying.”

Cassie felt a caustic weightlessness in her stomach. She felt the way she imagined a cornered animal must feel. “So what do we do?”

“I guess we start,” Leo said, “by stealing a car.”

12

_{ON THE ROAD}

IN THE MIDDLE OF OUR LIFE—NO, THAT wasn’t right.

In the middle of the journey of our life (yes) I came to myself in a wood (but not just a wood; what was it?) a dark wood, a dark wood where the straight way was lost…

Nerissa came to herself in an unfamiliar bed in a small room with the shades drawn. Ethan’s sleeping body was beside her for the first time in seven years, which was perhaps why lines from The Divine Comedy were running through her mind as she fumbled toward awareness, drawn out of sleep by daylight scything past the margins of the window blinds… reciting poetry to herself as if she were still chasing her degree, lost in memories more pleasant than yesterday’s. Oh god, she thought. Yesterday. The sickening weight of what they had seen and done.

When they first arrived here (a generic Motel 6 off the turnpike) Ethan had been exhausted and driving erratically. He had barely been able to strip to his underwear before he tumbled into bed and fell fast asleep. Nerissa had been equally exhausted but she had forced herself to stand under a hot shower before she followed him to bed, needing to wash off the stink, real or imagined, of kerosene and soot and blood and crushed green leaves.

And today might not be any better than yesterday. Face that fact, she instructed herself. Yesterday the simulacrum had blinded itself and she had cut off both its legs and tied crude tourniquets around its stumps and dumped its surviving fraction into the trunk of the car. Today she would attempt to interrogate it. Or bury it. Or both. Probably both.

What was almost as hard to bear as the physical horror of yesterday’s events was the look Ethan had given her, not once but several times, an expression of disbelief bordering on distaste. As if her actions had passed beyond the bounds of decency… and maybe they had, but that was a line she had stopped trying to draw.

Finding a place to interrogate Winston Bayliss was the morning’s pressing problem. This rented room wouldn’t do. So she paid the bill at the motel desk and they drove west, mostly in silence, and left the turnpike where Ethan’s map showed a nature reserve. It was a cold day, the wind tumbling blunt grey clouds from the western to the eastern horizon. They parked on the margin of the road in a stand of sugar maples and yellow birch. Nerissa opened the trunk of the car, and Ethan helped her carry Winston Bayliss into the shadow of the woods.

She had bound the stumps of the sim’s legs and wrapped a makeshift bandage over the clotted sockets where its eyes had been. She had covered the bullet wounds in its body with strips of flannel (from an old shirt of Ethan’s) and duct tape. She had wrapped what remained of its lower body in a plastic trash bag, to keep the mess inside, and that was how they carried it, Nerissa grasping its arms, Ethan supporting the bagged torso, stepping through drifts of brittle leaves and over fallen tree trunks colonized by yellow shelf fungus, until they were safely distant from the road. Then they propped Winston Bayliss more or less upright against an outcrop of mossy granite.

Inevitably, the sim was dying. What was surprising was that it had not yet died. The smell coming from it was obscene, the same odor Nerissa had tried and failed to purge from herself the night before, a stench so ponderous she imagined weighing it on a scale. She was careful to stand upwind.

The simulacrum’s voice was a moist, gurgling rasp. It began by asking for water. Nerissa put a plastic water bottle within its reach and watched as the simulacrum groped for it in the dry leaves. The creature looked oddly natural in this setting, she thought—as if it had grown from the detritus of the forest floor, mushroom-pale and streaked with autumn colors.

“Better just let it talk,” Ethan suggested. “Let it say what it wants to say.” Because that was all it would ever say. It would say what it wanted them to hear. Nothing more. Nothing less. It was beyond any power of coercion.

The simulacrum repeated some of what it had told them yesterday, about the hypercolony being part of a vast ecology that stretched across light-years of space. It addressed most of these remarks to Ethan, who listened without expression. It insisted once again that it was part of a parasitical system that had recently infected the hypercolony in order to commandeer its apparatus of reproduction.

Reproduction, Nerissa thought: Ethan had once called it the blade of evolution. There was no intelligence in evolution, only the cuttingboard logic of selective reproduction. She envisioned the work of evolution as a kind of blind, inarticulate poetry. What was it Charles Darwin had said? From so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved… There is grandeur in this view of life.

Grandeur or horror. The idea that all the kaleidoscopic strangeness of biological systems could unfold without guidance or motivation was almost too unsettling to accept.

Ethan had written in one of his books that “nature knows without knowing,” and in his Society papers he had compared the hypercolony to an anthill or a termite nest. The anthill knows how to build itself, how to breed workers, how to feed and cosset its queen. But in fact the anthill knew nothing: what looked like knowledge was only a set of procedural rules, a chemical template constructed by a complex environment. And thus the hypercolony. It appeared to know far more than human beings—it even knew how to manipulate human beings. But it knew these things the way an anthill knows. It exploited language but it didn’t understand language. It excreted words the way a worker bee excretes royal jelly.

In its bed of leaves, the dying sim excreted words into the autumn air.

By human standards, it said, the hypercolony’s life cycle is immensely long. But it is finite. It begins and ends in a brief, intense pulse of reproductive activity, a kind of swarming, in which it broadcasts its progeny to distant stars. On Earth, that pulse began almost ten years ago.

For ten years the hypercolony has been using borrowed human technology and unwitting human collaboration to construct its means of reproduction on the surface of the Earth. This is the culmination of the hypercolony’s reproductive strategy. Any threat to the reproductive mechanism it has constructed is an existential threat to the hypercolony itself. That’s why the Correspondence Society was targeted seven years ago—to protect the hypercolony’s means of reproduction, which would have been threatened by premature disclosure.

It was a sinfully bloodless way to describe serial acts of murder, Nerissa thought. But, of course, the sim had long since ceased appealing for sympathy. And it claimed not to be the responsible party.

Snow began to fall from the cloud-heavy sky, gusting through the leafless branches of the trees. A few small flakes collected on the sim’s face and melted into droplets, pink with dried blood. The creature’s voice was hoarse. It paused to drink once more from the water bottle.

When it spoke again, Nerissa had to lean closer to hear it.

The hypercolony evolved to live in the vacuum of space, but so did many other organisms. The hypercolony was already infected with a parasite when it arrived in this solar system, or became infected soon thereafter. The parasite lay dormant and undetected for centuries. Once the process of reproduction began, the parasite was activated.

The parasite is analogous to a virus: it can reproduce itself only by commandeering the reproductive mechanism of another organism. For more than a year now it has been exploiting the hypercolony’s resources for its own purposes. The mechanism by which the hypercolony reproduces itself has been hijacked. The facility that was meant to deliver the hypercolony’s seed organisms to nearby stars has been doing something very different—creating and launching new viral packets to follow and infect the hypercolony’s vulnerable offspring.

In one of Ethan’s books there was a similar story, which Nerissa had found horrifying. Carpenter ants in Thailand were susceptible to infection by a certain fungus. The fungal threads germinated and grew in the ant’s body, and as they infiltrated the infected ant’s brain it would begin to climb obsessively—madly—to the highest leaf on the highest limb it could reach. There it died, creating for the fungal growth now sprouting from the ant’s corpse a launching pad from which its spores would be distributed over as broad an area as possible. Some few of those spores might then germinate inside another carpenter ant, which in its fatal madness would climb to the highest leaf on the highest limb it could reach…

But the hypercolony isn’t dead, nor is it entirely defenseless. Its final strategy is to destroy the reproductive mechanism it created, in order to deny its use to the parasitic entity and to protect its own potential offspring. And it wants to manipulate what remains of the Correspondence Society into collaborating with it in that effort.

Well, why not? From the human point of view, the “reproductive mechanism” (if such a thing actually existed) was little more than a debilitating tumor. It deserved to be destroyed, no matter which side of this celestial feeding frenzy it served.

The dying sim shivered. Its shiver became something like a convulsion. The water bottle dropped from its right hand, while its left clenched empty air. It coughed a spray of red and ochre phlegm into the nearby leaves and freshly fallen snow.

“Excuse me,” it said.

Excuse me. If you have any questions, you should ask them while there’s time.

Nerissa had only one question—was Cassie one of those people supposedly being exploited by the hypercolony?—but Ethan stepped in front of her, bending on one knee to address the sim. He looked like he was praying to it, Nerissa thought. Or proposing marriage. “The mechanism that manipulates radio signals, does the hypercolony control that or do you?”

You meaning the parasite, the virus.

“I do,” the sim whispered.

(But there is no I, Nerissa reminded herself. No mind. Just process.)

“So the hypercolony can’t use that tool anymore. But both entities are able to produce and control simulacra?”

“Yes.”

“How are they created? How were you created?”

“I was born to a human mother.”

No, Nerissa thought. That can’t be right.

“The reproductive mechanism, will you tell us where it is?”

“No.”

“Because you want to protect it?”

“Yes.”

“And you’re implying we should want to protect it.”

“Yes.”

“Why would we do that?”

“Its destruction would be disastrous for humanity. Not just because of the temporary loss of global communication, though that would be catastrophic in itself. The boundaries that have been placed on human behavior would be breached. Conflicts could escalate out of control. You know what warfare meant a hundred years ago. Consider what it would mean now, if it were allowed to happen again.”

“I find that unconvincing,” Ethan said.

“I don’t expect to convince you. But I hope you’ll at least consider what’s at stake. More specifically, it’s entirely likely that people you care about will be killed unless you intervene.”

“What people?”

The eyeless simulacrum turned its head toward Nerissa. “Cassie. And Thomas. And many others.”

“Do you mean what they’re doing is dangerous? Or do you mean you’ll kill them if you have the chance?”

“Both.”

“Then why in God’s name should we help you?”

“I’m not asking you to help me. If you choose to protect your civilization in general or your loved ones in particular, my interests will also be served.”

“Then tell us where Thomas and Cassie are—can you do that?”

“I don’t know where they are, but I believe they’re looking for Werner Beck.”

Nerissa couldn’t restrain herself any longer. “How do you know that? What do you know about Cassie and Thomas, and what do you know about Werner Beck?”

But that was a question the sim refused to answer.

It died as they watched.

Its human parts died first. Nerissa supposed the creature’s heart simply stopped beating, exhausted by fever and infection. It exhaled for the last time, its stinking breath a cloud of moisture quickly carried away by the breeze. Then the internal parts of it lost all cohesion. The body went slack and began to leak green fluid from its many wounds.

Nerissa helped Ethan cover the remains of the simulacrum with a blanket of fallen leaves—not to protect the creature, and much less out of any misplaced respect for it, but because it would be an unpleasant and dangerous discovery for any hiker or local child who happened to stumble across it.

Animals would get at the remains, no doubt. The bones would be scattered. By winter’s end only ants and beetles would have any interest in what was left. The sim’s corpse might help feed a few insect colonies deep in the pine duff and rotting logs of the forest, an irony Nerissa found unamusing. There is grandeur in this view of life. Well, no, she thought. Not much.

“So we have to find Werner Beck,” she said when they were back in the car. The snowfall had grown more intense and the road was a pale, curtained obscurity. “I assume you know how to do that?”

“He’s in Missouri, according to his letter.”

The letter Ethan had collected from his mailbox as they fled the farm house. “Did he have anything else useful to say?”

“You can read what he wrote when we find a place to stop.”

“All that stuff the sim said. What do you think? You believe any of it?”

Ethan shrugged. “Some of it might have been true. Some of it sounded plausible, at least.”

There was a quotation Nerissa recalled, something from a Greek philosopher named Xenophanes. Ethan used to admire the way she could dredge up fragments of poetry and prose from her catch-all memory. But it wasn’t a talent, it was a freak of nature. Her own tawdry little magic trick. “And even if by chance he were to utter the perfect truth, he would himself not know it, for all is but a woven web of guesses.”

“Yeah,” Ethan said, “that sounds about right.”

13

_{RURAL KANSAS}

CASSIE WASN’T SURPRISED BY HOW easily Leo managed to steal a car. Boosting cars was a skill he had learned from his friends back in Buffalo—not his Society friends but the east side musicians and petty criminals he hung out with on weekends. The company he kept was one of the reasons Cassie had never taken him seriously, and why Beth’s fascination with him had seemed so shallow. But now that Cassie was a criminal herself, she appreciated the skills Leo had learned.

Armistice Day had brought a lot of cars into Jordan Landing from neighboring farms and rural routes, which presented a wealth of opportunities. Leo waited until after midnight, then selected a late-model white Ford Equipoise, an economy vehicle common in these parts, parked in the lot of a motel a half mile north on the main strip. The owner of the car was probably asleep and likely wouldn’t report the theft until morning, which would give them a decent head start. He broke off the car’s radio antenna and used it to jimmy open the driver’s-side door. Firing up the ignition was a more serious obstacle, but there was a tool kit in the glove compartment—tire-pressure gauge, needle-nose pliers, a screwdriver with interchangeable bits—and with these Leo somehow contrived to start the engine. Thankfully, none of this attracted any attention. God bless the peaceful little towns of this peaceful land, Cassie thought, and God bless their honest and trusting inhabitants.

By dawn they were a couple of hundred miles west and within an hour’s drive of their destination. They were headed for an auto-repair shop called Dowd’s, on a flat strip of Kansas highway between Salina and Great Bend.

DOWD’S AUTOMOBILE SERVICE AND PARTS, the sign said.

It wasn’t much of a sign: a slab of whitewashed plywood on which the letters had been stenciled with orange paint. It had been tacked to what looked like a converted barn, the only visible structure from horizon to horizon where Federal Turnpike 156 crossed the exit for a town called Galatea. The unpaved yard where they parked was littered with rusted engine parts and the shell of what Leo said was a 1972 Packard, and the only thing moving was a set of cut-tin wind chimes hanging from a bracket screwed to the building’s aluminum siding.

At the sound of Leo’s horn a man emerged from the darkness behind the corrugated-steel door of the garage, wiping his hands on a blackened rag and blinking at the morning sun. The man was tall, skinny except for the slight paunch under his coveralls, and somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty years old. His moustache and the sweep of brown hair dangling over his collar made him look like he’d stepped out of a Civil War daguerreotype.

Cassie climbed out of the car, Thomas beside her. She desperately needed to pee, though she dreaded to imagine what might pass for a restroom in this establishment.

The man came to a stop a few cautious feet from the car. “What can I do for you folks?”

Leo said, “Are you Eugene Dowd?”

The man stopped wiping his hands and tucked the rag into the hip pocket of his coveralls. “I guess I am. Who might you be?”

“My name’s Leo Beck. I think you know my father.”

Dowd remained expressionless. The wind gusted, and Cassie heard the clatter of the wind chimes—like music that forgot how to be music—and the creaking of the Packard’s loose hood. Finally Dowd said, “Is this your car?”

“Not exactly.”

“Uh-huh. I was afraid of that. I dislike having a stolen vehicle on my property. Bring it inside where it won’t be so damn obvious. Can you prove you’re who you say you are?”

“I think so.”

“Well, we’ll talk about that. All you lot get inside too.”

“Is there a bathroom?” Cassie felt compelled to ask.

Eugene Dowd gazed at her. “Toilet around the back. It’s nothing fancy.”

No doubt, Cassie thought.

Leo had first mentioned Eugene Dowd during the night’s drive. Cassie had asked whether he had learned the name from the papers stashed under the floor of his father’s house.

Leo had nodded. “The name, not much else. His instructions were to take the key to Eugene Dowd, at a certain location in Kansas.”

Typical Correspondence Society subterfuge. Aunt Ris had once described this kind of reasoning as “paranoia—necessary paranoia, maybe, but still, a kind of mental illness.” And Leo’s father, Werner Beck, was even more systematically paranoid than most Society members.

“So what else is in those papers?”

“A lot of it is statistics he compiled, plus photocopies of newspaper and journal articles…”

“Like what?”

“All kinds of things. Statistics on mining in China, shipping in the Pacific. Imports and exports of minerals and rare earths. Newspaper clippings from the last twenty years, some of them about un explained deaths. Technical articles. Notes from his studies of simulacrum biology. Maps.”

“Maps of what?”

“Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Peru.”

“Why, what’s there?”

Leo shrugged. “I think it’s in case something happened to him, maybe somebody else in the Society could make sense of it.”

Beth had somehow found the courage or the insensitivity to ask, “Do you think your father’s dead?”

Leo kept his eyes on the road. Night on the turnpike, empty prairie, nothing to see but the periodic glare of passing headlights. “There’s obviously some reason he left the house in a hurry. As for whether he’s still alive, I don’t know. There’s no way to know.”

“So maybe Eugene Dowd can tell us,” Beth said.

“The first thing I got to do,” Dowd said to Leo, “is make sure you’re the real deal. I will admit, you kind of resemble your old man. But that’s not proof one way or another. You might not even be a human being.”

The interior of the garage consisted of a complexly stained concrete floor under a cavernous arched roof. A sort of second-story balcony running along one wall had been partitioned into crude rooms—maybe Dowd lived up there, though Cassie found the thought depressing. The workspace was equipped with hand tools and power tools, large and small, none of which she could identify, and a trestle table of rough-cut two-by-fours on which a partially disassembled automobile engine sat. Chains and pulleys dangled from overhead beams. The air smelled of gasoline and of the chemical toilet out back, which she and Beth had hurriedly used.

She sat next to Leo on a torn leather sofa apparently rescued from a trash yard. Beth and Thomas squeezed in beside them. Eugene Dowd pulled up a wooden chair and straddled it.

Dowd was no Society member, Cassie thought, or at least he was unlike any Society member she had ever met. Obviously, he obviously wasn’t a scholar or a scientist. He sounded exactly like what he appeared to be: a rural-route auto mechanic with a chip on his shoulder, unimpressed by the four city-bred young people who had arrived uninvited on his doorstep.

“How am I supposed to prove I’m human?”

“Well, we could stick a knife in you and see what color it comes out. That generally works.”

“Very funny.”

“Or you could show me a certain key.”

Leo stood up, fumbled in his pocket—What if he lost it? Cassie wondered for one terrifying moment—then produced the key from his father’s safe.

“Okay, let me see,” Dowd said.

With obvious reluctance Leo put the key in Dowd’s open hand. The lines in Dowd’s palm were etched with motor oil. His thumb was calloused, his nails cut clinically short.

“Good enough?” Leo asked.

“Not yet it isn’t. We’ll see if it opens what it’s supposed to open. Come on.”

Dowd led them to the rear of the garage. He pulled away a tarp that covered a white unmarked delivery van, some years old. The dust released by this gesture hung in the air and tickled Cassie’s throat.

Dowd applied the key to the driver’s-side door of the van. It slid into the lock and turned. He pulled the door open.

“Well, then,” he said. “Well, then.”

The van hadn’t been open in quite a while. Stale air with tang of vinyl upholstery gusted out. “It looks like any old van,” Cassie said.

“It’s what’s in back that matters.”

“So what’s in back?”

Eugene Dowd pocketed the key. “We’ll talk about that later.”

Dowd escorted them up a flight of stairs to the loft he used as an office and bedroom—a few chairs, a table, an ancient refrigerator, sink and hot plate, a mattress on the floor—and asked if they wanted lunch. Cassie looked at the unwashed plates stacked on a sideboard. “Don’t worry, girl,” Dowd said. “All’s I got to offer you is canned chili and some wrapped sandwiches from the 7-Eleven in Galatea. Fresh enough you won’t poison yourself, if that’s what’s worrying you.”

Thomas said he was hungry, and Cassie had to admit that she was, too: hungry enough to accept a chicken salad sandwich, as cold as Dowd’s wheezing refrigerator could make it. Thomas took the same, as did Leo and Beth. Dowd offered them Cokes and took a bottle of beer for himself.

He levered the cap from the bottle. “So, Leo—I bet you could have opened the door of that van even without a key, isn’t that right?”

“I don’t know. What do you mean?”

“Don’t be bashful. Your daddy told me you got hauled into juvie court one time for vehicle theft, attempted.”

“It was stupid. I was showing off.”

“That’s why they let you go with a fine and a lecture?”

“I guess my father told you that, too. Is he here?”

“Your old man? No.”

“Then where is he?”

“Werner Beck doesn’t post his whereabouts with me, at least not on a regular basis. But since you showed up without him, I doubt the news is good. I was told you wouldn’t come here without him unless something unexpected happened.”

“So how do you know my father? And what’s so special about that van?”

“Well, Leo, it’s a kind of a long story. Which I expect you need to hear. It was your father who come to me, by the way, not the other way around. I was living in Amarillo, this was most of ten years ago. Had a little one-room apartment, making ends meet with federal Work and Welfare checks. Your old man just knocked at the door one day and introduced himself. He said he’d seen a story about me in a local paper and he wanted to know if it was true.”

“If what was true?”

Dowd ran his thumb along the label of the beer bottle and looked off into the dim cavern of the garage. “I need to start at the beginning. But I guess you got time. We’ll talk a little. Then we’ll do some work on that car you stole, so it won’t be so easy to identify. Because pretty soon we need to leave here, and we won’t all fit in the van.”

“Leave and go where?”

“A place I dearly hoped I’d never see again. But life shits on hope.” He took a long drink. “Isn’t that the truth?”

14

_{MONTMORENCY, PENNSYLVANIA}

INTERSTATE 80 PASSED THROUGH THE college town of Montmorency, Pennsylvania. The Federal College at Montmorency—one of the colleges established by the Wallace administration in the 1930s—was the town’s biggest business, apart from a couple of manufacturing plants and a limestone quarry. The town was peaceful in the long light of an end-of-November afternoon, many of its neat wood-frame houses flying American flags from front-porch stanchions. It looked like a nice place to live.

But the town had another distinguishing feature: Montmorency had been the home of the late Winston Bayliss, according to the ID Ethan had collected from the dead sim’s wallet.

He had been surprised when Nerissa suggested they drive by the address listed on Bayliss’s driver’s license. “It’ll take us out of our way.”

“Only a little.”

“I thought you wanted to get to Werner Beck as soon as possible.”

“I do. But this might be important.”

“Why? What’s the point?”

She shrugged and looked away.

“It might also be dangerous,” he added.

“Everything we’re doing,” she said, “is dangerous.”

Last night he had talked to Nerissa—more or less for the first time—about their plans.

She had left Buffalo in a furious but unfocused state of mind, determined to enlist Ethan in the hunt for Cassie and Thomas. He understood that. And he understood the guilt she must be feeling. The careful precautions she had put in place after the murders of 2007 had backfired, badly. Cassie and Thomas had left home under the impression that a full-scale second-wave attack was underway. Following protocols, they had gone to the nearest Society member, who happened to be Leo Beck. Leo (and Leo’s girlfriend, a young woman named Beth Vance) had left town, most likely to find Leo’s father. Nerissa was tormented by the idea that Cassie and Thomas might believe she was dead, and she was reasonably afraid that connecting with Werner Beck might put them in even greater danger.

Ethan also knew she had never cared for Werner Beck. She had met him at a couple of Society gatherings. “Even in a community of paranoids,” she said at one of those meet-ups, “this guy is scary-paranoid.”

“He’s right about a lot of things,” Ethan had said. “He’s produced more valuable research than anybody else.”

“He thinks the Society is the vanguard of some kind of human insurgency. We’ll be lucky if he doesn’t get us all arrested.”

“Maybe he is a little crazy. But he’s smart, and he has deep pockets.”

“And you think that’s a good combination?”

So Nerissa was worried about Cassie and Thomas coming under the influence of Werner Beck, more so since the sim’s baleful confession. And Ethan more or less agreed with her. Find Cassie and Thomas, let Nerissa protect them, leave Beck to fight his own wars—fine. Ethan was on board with that. But afterward?

Everything had changed. The dead sim was hardly a reliable source of information, but the attack at the farm house suggested that at least some part of what it had said was true: there was internal conflict in the hypercolony. And although the Society survivors had tried to remain hidden, they had self-evidently failed: the simulacra had obviously known exactly where to find them. So going back into hiding wasn’t an option. They had never really been in hiding.

So, even assuming he and Nerissa successfully reconnected with Cassie and Thomas, what then? Nerissa had been living on the inheritance she had received after the death of her parents in 1998. Ethan had cashed out all his investments in 2007 and had been spending frugally (apart from a few high-dollar weapons and security purchases) ever since. Between the two of them, their resources amounted to very little. Both of them would have to find new ways of making a living and of defending themselves (and Cassie, and Thomas) from future attacks.

Should there be any such attacks. If the sim was to be believed (which of course it was not), the hypercolony was dying. If the hypercolony’s death resulted in a global communications collapse, the consequences would be catastrophic, at least in the short run. And while such a disaster could be overcome, there remained the question of how the world would fare without the hypercolony’s subtle suppression of human bellicosity.

Ethan and Nerissa were facing the same problems, and it seemed to Ethan that they could help each other out, but that was hardly a plan—it was barely more than a wistful thought. He had been married to this woman for five years and physically separated from her for seven. And although in many ways she was still the woman he had loved and married, in other and significant ways she had changed. He no longer knew what to expect from her. Their old, easy intimacy had evaporated. She was nine-tenths a stranger to him.

Winston Bayliss’s house—that is, the house at the address on the simulacrum’s license—was a small home on a street of similar homes. Like many of these houses it featured a wooden front porch in modest disrepair. The lawn had turned patchy and yellow with autumn. A faux-rustic peach basket, planted with geraniums that had died in the last frost, substituted for a garden.

Nerissa had opened the car door before Ethan could say, “Whoa—where are you going?”

“It looks like somebody’s still living here. Maybe it’s the real Winston Bayliss. I want to knock on the door and see who answers.”

“Why?”

But she didn’t answer, and he had no choice but to hurry after her as she strode determinedly up the driveway and onto the porch. She rang the doorbell, then pulled back the screen door and knocked.

Should have brought the pistol, Ethan thought—what if there was another sim inside, what if the house was some kind of sim factory?—but the door creaked open to reveal a stoop-shouldered elderly woman leaning on a walker. She peered at them through bottle-glass lenses and said, “I thought you might be Outpatient Therapy. But you’re not Outpatient Therapy, are you?”

“No, ma’am,” Nerissa said, apparently unfazed.

“No, of course you’re not. Therapy comes on Wednesdays. I’m sorry. So what can I do for you folks?”

“Maybe this is the wrong address. We’re looking for Winston Bayliss?”

“Oh! Well, not the wrong address, but the wrong door. Winston has a separate door around the side. He lives in the basement. He has his own apartment down there. He did the renovation himself.”

“Ah… is he home today?”

“Afraid not. He’s at a conference in Boca Raton and he won’t be back until next week. Something to do with his work. He explained it, but I don’t really understand.”

“You’re Mr. Bayliss’s landlady?”

She grinned. “I’m sorry, but that makes me laugh. No! I mean yes, Winston gives me a monthly allowance for the use of the basement. But I’m not his landlady, I’m his mother. Amanda Bayliss. Mrs. Carl Bayliss, though Carl’s been gone five years now. What did you want to see Winston about?”

“We’re from the Blue Horizon Insurance Agency. Mr. Bayliss contacted us a while back about the possibility of taking out a policy. We were hoping to follow up on that.”

“Well, that can’t be true,” Mrs. Bayliss said.

To her credit, Ethan thought, Nerissa didn’t miss a beat. “Really? Why not?

“I apologize, but it makes me tired to stand… will you come in for a moment? Though I don’t believe I’ll be buying any insurance from you.”

“Of course,” Nerissa said.

“I would offer you coffee, but I don’t drink it anymore. My doctor recommends I don’t.” Mrs. Bayliss frowned. “There might be some instant up in the cupboard. I could boil water, if you like.”

“No, ma’am,” Nerissa said. “Thank you all the same.”

Mrs. Bayliss’s front room was a time capsule in which no item of furniture appeared to be less than thirty years old. The pictures on the end tables bracketing the sofa featured a man who might have been the late Carl and a child who might have been Winston (if Winston Bayliss had ever really been a child). The room’s double-paned windows had been shut and the curtains drawn, enclosing a silence in which the ticking of a mantel clock seemed absurdly loud.

There was nothing to suggest that the house was anything more than the longtime residence of an elderly woman who had been widowed some years before. But that didn’t mean Mrs. Bayliss was necessarily any more human than the creature she claimed as her son.

“You said you doubted Winston would consider a policy with us,” Nerissa said. “May I ask why?”

Mrs. Bayliss looked at Ethan. “Do you talk at all, mister, or are you just for decoration?”

“I’m, ah, in training,” Ethan managed. “I’ll chime in if I’m needed.”

“Just wondered. Anyway, no. No, I can’t see Winston wanting to take out insurance. I assume it’s life insurance you’re selling? But that generally calls for a physical, and Winston won’t see a doctor for love or money. Thankfully, he’s healthy as a horse.”

“Well, that’s good,” Nerissa said. “I hope you’re the same, Mrs. Bayliss, although I see…”

“The brace I’m wearing on my leg? That’s why Outpatient Therapy comes by every week. I had a knee replaced in September. Arthritis. I think it’s wonderful what they can do nowadays. Not that it was such a breeze, the surgery I mean. The physiotherapy’s no fun, either. Though I do like the State nurse who helps me with it. She tries to sound tough, but she’s a sweetie.”

“Winston didn’t get his fear of doctors from you, then.”

“Nor from his father. But he’s had it all his life. That’s why I can’t picture him volunteering for a physical. Even when he was younger, back when he was in school…. but I don’t imagine you want to hear these stories.”

“I don’t mind,” Nerissa said. “Frankly, it’s nice to get out of the cold and chat a little. Just don’t tell my supervisor.” She chuckled, and Mrs. Bayliss laughed agreeably. “Every once in a while we pull a name from the wrong list and end up calling on someone who’s already declined our offer. Probably Winston is one of those. I’ll have a word with my boss about it. It doesn’t do us any good to bother people who aren’t interested in what we have to sell. Though I have to say, it’s an attractive policy package at the price.”

“I’m sure it is.”

The ease with which Nerissa told these lies surprised Ethan. He guessed it was a skill she had taught herself since 2007, the way he had taught himself marksmanship.

“Fear of doctors,” she said, “is more common than you might think.”

“Winston must have been born with it. Fortunately he was a healthy child. Maybe a little too cautious. He always disliked sports, or anything rough-and-tumble. But he seldom caught cold and never came down with anything more serious, even though he wouldn’t submit to vaccinations. The one time he did hurt himself—well, that was probably harder on me and Carl than it was on him.”

“How so?”

“He was walking home from school one day when a car clipped him. Winston was ten years old, and the car driver—we never did find out who it was, but I suspect it was one of those high-school boys—Adlai Stevenson High is just four streets away and I’ve seen how they drive, boys with their first license in their pocket—anyhow, Winston wasn’t badly hurt, but he was skinned up pretty good and he broke a bone in his arm.”

“So he must have seen a doctor.”

“Well, no—not that we didn’t try to take him! I can’t even say for sure the bone was broken—I’m no expert—but he couldn’t use the arm right and there was a lump up above the elbow and real serious bruising, his whole arm was practically green with it. So I called the doctor and he said to bring Winston in, but while Carl was warming up the car—and this was in the dead of winter—Winston tore out the back door and ran off.”

“Ran off?”

“Disappeared for, believe it or not, three days. We had the whole town looking for him. It made the news. Lost boy, probably injured, out in the cold. Honestly, Carl and I were prepared for the worst.”

“But they found him?”

“In fact they didn’t. Winston came home all by himself. Walked in the door five days later as if nothing had happened. Of course, all hell broke loose. He said he’d been hiding in an old barn on one of the rural routes and that he kept warm by building a fire at night. And when we asked him why he’d done all this—and believe me, we asked him that question more often than he cared to hear it—he said it was because he didn’t want to go to the doctor.”

“Even with a broken arm!”

“Well… we sure thought it had been broken. But it was healed by the time he got back. So he must have just sprained it. And although it probably would have been wise to get him checked out anyhow, we didn’t insist. Does that sound foolish?” She shook her head. “Carl and I only had the one child and we probably indulged him more than we should have. Some days I think that’s why Winston never married. We coddled him into a lonely bachelorhood. But as my husband used to say, all you can do is the best you can do. There are no guarantees in this life. Not even”—Mrs. Bayliss smiled at her joke—“if you take out insurance.”

The conversation drifted from Mrs. Bayliss’s son Winston to the weather lately, and Nerissa checked her watch and said they had another appointment to keep. Mrs. Bayliss saw them to the door (a little abashed, Ethan guessed, at how garrulous she had been) and wished them well. “I’ll let Winston know you stopped by.”

“Thank you.”

“You want to leave a card or anything?”

“It doesn’t sound like your son is a likely prospect for us. When do you expect him back?”

“He said he’d let me know. He hasn’t phoned in a few days. That’s not like him. But he’s probably just having a good time down there in Florida. Last time I saw him he was cheerful as a chipmunk.”

And the last time I saw him, Ethan couldn’t help thinking, he was lying in a bed of fallen leaves, eyeless, dying.

Nerissa was somber in the car, and Ethan respected her silence as he drove back onto the turnpike. The sun beat through the windshield with a clarifying light.

Eventually she said, “So Mrs. Bayliss isn’t a sim.”

“Her knee, you mean.”

“Surgery or even an X-ray would have exposed her. And she wasn’t faking it. You saw the scar?”

He hadn’t, but Nerissa said she caught a glimpse when Mrs. Bayliss first sat down, the cotton skirt briefly rucking up to expose a line of suture marks stark as railroad tracks. “Obviously she’s not afraid of doctors.”

“But Winston was.”

The nature and origin of the simulacra had been debated by the survivors since 2007. Most assumed the sims were manufactured in their final adult form. But that had never been more than an assumption. Apparently a baseless one. “So what he told us was true,” Ethan said. “He was born to a human mother.”

“I guess so. But it’s a horrifying idea. That she actually gave birth to this thing, nurtured it, dressed it, sent it to school, and never noticed anything unusual beyond its reluctance to visit a doctor….” Nerissa shuddered. “That’s incredibly fucking creepy.”

“But it’s possible,” Ethan said. “The sims aren’t just approximate copies of human beings. In every detail except their internal structure, they’re perfect copies. It’s tempting to think that if you knew a sim intimately enough something would give it away, some subtlety it hadn’t quite mastered. But that’s wrong. Even Mrs. Bayliss couldn’t guess.”

“I suppose I thought the sims were made for a purpose—to be assassins—and after they did their jobs maybe they just, I don’t know, dried up and blew away in the wind. But if what she said is true, it means they can pass for years without being noticed. Anyone could be one.”

“Not you.”

She gave him a sharp look. “What do you mean?”

“It’s been a while,” Ethan said. “But the appendectomy scar.”

She surprised him by blushing. “Yes, okay. True. And you had chest X-rays the winter you came down with pneumonia. So we can trust each other.”

“It’s the rest of the world we can’t be sure about.”

“Also, if Mrs. Bayliss is human and gave birth to a sim—how’s that work? Was her husband a sim, too? But that only pushes the question back a generation.”

“It’s not uncommon for one species to exploit the nurturing functioning of another species. It’s called brood parasitism.” In fact it was the same kind of parasitism Bayliss had claimed was happening within the hypercolony itself.

“But what’s the mechanism exactly? How does a perfectly ordinary woman in a perfectly ordinary town give birth to a non-human child?”

Ethan had no answer.

“And if they’re so perfectly human, we can’t even be sure about the Correspondence Society. You guys were always careful about using the U.S. Mail so the hypercolony couldn’t listen in, but what if you had a ringer among you? What if a sim was reading your monographs all along?”

He had thought about this. “There’s no way to rule out the possibility. It might be true. Even though we were in hiding, the sims had no trouble finding Cassie and Thomas. Or me. And Bayliss seemed to know exactly how much we knew about the hypercolony. So it would probably be smart to assume that the Society has been infiltrated.”

“So who can we trust? You, me—”

“That’s two. And probably Werner Beck.”

“Beck!” Nerissa said scornfully. “I never did trust Beck.”

15

_{DOWD’S GARAGE}

ONE PART OF EUGENE DOWD’S CONVERTED barn had been set aside for paintwork, and Cassie watched with fascination as he worked on the stolen car. Even more fascinating—in a much scarier way—was Dowd’s running monologue.

First he unbolted the car’s license plates and set them aside on his workbench. The plates were evidence, he said, and he would cut them apart with tin snips and bury the pieces in the yard before they left. Then he snapped off the Ford’s removable trim and moldings and used a power sander to rough up the paint. “Ordinarily,” he said, “I’d sand down to metal, but we’re in a little bit of a hurry here.” Cassie guessed this wasn’t the first vehicle he’d repainted, probably not the first stolen vehicle he’d repainted.

When Dowd bent to sand the side panels she could see the blades of his hips working under the denim sprawl of his jeans. Paint dust roiled up around him, but he wasn’t wearing a mask and didn’t appear to care. When he spoke (between bouts with the noisy sander) he kept his eyes on the Ford, as if Cassie and Thomas and Leo and Beth weren’t fully present, as if his words were addressed not to them but to something invisible that lived in the motor of the car. I was in a little town outside of Amarillo, name of it doesn’t matter, when Werner Beck found me. This was, let’s see, five going on six years ago now.

The town was where I grew up but I’d been gone a long time and I came back because I didn’t know where else to go. I’d been doing odd jobs, carpentry and electrical work mostly, out of the country, but I was done with that, for reasons I’ll get to shortly.

So there I was, back in town and out of work. Since I left both my parents had died, but I didn’t know that till I got back. I wasn’t real good about keeping in touch. So the news was kind of a shock. Not that they were much of a family. My daddy drank when he wasn’t digging foundations and my mom worked as a beautician all her adult life. Cancer took her, and sometime later my daddy shot himself. Their house was sold off for back taxes. I came home to nothing, in other words. All I wanted was to curl up in a safe place and forget what I’d seen down in the Atacama, and all I got was more fuckin’ grief.

I rented me a little place at the edge of town and I guess I meant to sit there smoking weed and watching shit on TV until my savings ran out, but one day Werner Beck knocked on the door. At the time, I didn’t know who the fuck he was. I figured he wanted to collect a debt or sell me a Bible. But what he said was, Are you the Eugene Dowd who saw some unusual things in Chile last year? Which made we want to reach for a gun, except I didn’t have one. Relax, he tells me, I’m red-blooded all the way through. And I knew what that meant. So I told him to come in.

Naturally I wanted to know how he’d found me. He said he seen a piece in the local paper. He subscribed to what he called a clipping service. Clipping service sends him pieces from newspapers all over the country, big and little newspapers, if the article mentions certain words or phrases.

He didn’t say what those words or phrases were. But I knew the piece he was talking about. A column in the local rag, which is barely a real newspaper, mostly grocery coupons and classified ads. Well, some bored fucker wrote a column about what he called “colorful characters,” and I’d had the misfortune to run into this guy at a bar when I was too pissed for my own good—I told him a few things about the Atacama and he wrote it up like it was some big fucking joke. Local loser sees green men, that kind of shit.

Yeah, I told Beck, that’s my story, or part of it, but the paper didn’t use my name, so again, how’d you find me? I asked around, Beck says. Lot of trouble to go to, I say. Yeah, he says, but the thing is, Mr. Dowd, I believe you.

Well, there really wasn’t much in that newspaper column to believe, it seemed to me. The column told how I’d said there were Martians living in South America, which I didn’t. It even had a punch line. Like this: “I asked my newfound acquaintance whether his Martians were green, as in the comic books. ‘Yes,’ he confided, ‘green as grass—but only on the inside!’”

Fucking humiliating.

Beck saw the expression on my face and said, Look, Mr. Dowd, I’m serious about this. I know all about people who are green on the inside. And one thing I know is, they don’t think twice about committing murder. They killed a bunch of my friends. They tried to kill me.

Which made me realize he was serious. I said, How do I know you’re not one of them?

He told me that was a smart question and he loosened his belt and lifted up his shirt and showed me a scar where he had his appendix out. I asked him what that was supposed to prove. He said the hospital where he was treated would’ve noticed if he’d been bleeding green. Then he says, How about you?

I didn’t feel like showing him any scars, but he said that was okay, he’d take me at my word. At least for now. The word he used was “provisionally.”

Then we got down to business. Given what he’d already said, I asked him what he wanted. I want to hear your story, he says. And then I’ll tell you mine.

Once he had sanded the original paint Dowd washed the car with soapy water, dried it, and rinsed it again with a solution of mineral spirits. Then he taped off the parts he wanted to protect—windows, bumpers, trim. In the occasional silences, when Dowd wasn’t talking or operating power tools, Cassie heard wind rattling the corners and hollows of Dowd’s garage. Winter coming. She wasn’t sure what winter meant in this part of the country—probably not what it meant in Buffalo, where snow sometimes shut down the city for days.

Dowd broke for lunch as soon as the car was prepped for spraying. Lunch today was a rerun of lunch yesterday: convenience-store sandwiches. Cassie watched Dowd as he crammed a ham sandwich into his mouth, crumbs collecting in his moustache. He caught her looking and gave her a grin that wasn’t entirely friendly. Werner Beck trusts this man, Cassie reminded herself. But how much did she really know about Leo’s father?

“Had enough to eat?” Dowd asked, still gazing at Cassie.

She nodded.

Leo said, “You were going to tell us what you told my father.”

“Yeah.” Dowd wiped his mouth on the sleeve of his shirt. “I guess I was.”

I was sick of Texas and I wanted to travel, which is how I ended up on the Trans-American Highway—parts of it brand new in those days, all those tunnels and bridges through the Darien Gap—working my way south from the Canal Zone picking up odd jobs. Mostly construction and electrical, like I said. Or what ever came to hand. I slept rough from time to time but I was young and that was all right with me as long as I could move on when I felt like it. Just heading south, like some kind of migrating bird.

I was in Antofagasta, that’s in Chile, when I hooked up with a Dutch company that was doing some work out in the Atacama desert. Building and running a supply depot for a copper mine, supposedly. Crew was mostly local but the company had an arrangement with the unions that let them hire a few foreigners, a handful of Ecuadorian and Colombian guest workers and one American, me—the crew boss liked that I had a U.S. electrician’s certificate, which is pretty much the gold standard. So they bused us over the Coast Range and up the Antofagasta Road, then along one of those old roads that used to service nitrate mines, to a flat place where a little spur of the Ferrocarril ran out—the real high desert, dry as glass and air so thin you could see the moon by daylight.

In a couple of months we had four air-conditioned buildings up and running. More like ware houses than anything else. And it was all kind of a mystery. There was no copper mine in sight, far as I could see. The Dutch crew boss spoke Spanish and a little German but he liked to practice his English on me in the off-hours, so I asked him about that one time. Get a little Jenever into him and he was pretty friendly. But he didn’t have much to say. He’d been told the site was a depot to store supplies on their way from the railhead or the road to the mine—the mine itself being a ways east. And no, he said, you couldn’t see the mine from here, but some nights you could see a light, like a spotlight or what do you call it, one of those lights they shine at movie theaters, know what I’m talking about? A shaft of light going up into the desert air. What kind of mine has a light like that, I asked him. But he didn’t know. It wasn’t his business to know.

We, I mean the work crew, slept in temporary shelters, plywood bunkhouses with canvas roofs and the wind for ventilation. Some nights when I couldn’t sleep I went out to look for that light the crew boss talked about. I saw it once, a shaft of light coming up from the horizon, almost too faint to see. Straight-up vertical. It lasted about three minutes. Not real impressive, but it had no business being there.

Anyway, I stayed on after the construction was finished. The Dutch company’d been contracted to operate the depot once they’d built it, and they needed hands for cartage and security. And I didn’t have anything better to do and actually, strange as it sounds, I kind of liked it out there in the high desert. At least at first. It felt like time went slower there. Cities sort of rush you along, if you know what I mean. Whereas in the desert an hour goes by and nothing happens but maybe the wind blows a few grains of sand across the salares. The salt basins.

I made friends with a guy named Bastián. Bastián was a forklift driver from the south of the country, spoke English, claimed to have a grandmother who spoke Quechua, which meant fuck-all to me. Skinny little guy but strong for his size. Dark-haired. He had a sense of humor, which I appreciated. When I told him about the light on the horizon he grinned and said, Shit, Eugene, that’s the alicanto.

We were off behind the depot buildings in the shade, sharing a smoke where the crew boss wouldn’t see us. I said, Well, what’s an alicanto?

It’s a bird, he says. It’s got metal wings and it lives in caves and eats gold and silver. Its wings light up at night, all different colors.

Bullshit, I say.

Yeah, obviously, Bastián says. Or no, not bullshit exactly but a myth. A legend. The alicanto’s good luck for miners. Follow it to find silver or gold. But if it sees you, it leads you nowhere. It lets you die in the desert.

I’m no miner, I tell him. And I don’t believe in any fucking alicanto.

Fair enough, he says. I don’t believe in your light.

So I told him, next time I saw it I’d wake him up and show him.

But we got pretty busy about then. There were big shipments coming through. How it worked was, goods were trucked in from the railhead. Some of it was food but most of it was hardware. Electronics: integrated circuits, transformers, microwave generators. And some large-scale stuff. Machines for working metal. Aluminum parts. Tubes and piping. Crates listed on the manifest as powdered silicon carbide. Pressurized hydrogen. Mirrors, huge ones. Graphite. I mean, what the fuck? I’m no expert, but why does a copper mine need mirrors and graphite?

And it was a strange arrangement all around. These shipments were delivered from the Ferrocarril and the crates would sit in our store house for a couple of days, then a fleet of trucks would come down the road from the east and we’d load ’em up. It made no sense. Why not just deliver it all straight to the mine? Also, the guys who drove those trucks—copper miners, supposedly—never talked to us. They’d nod if you said hello, but they were all about their manifests. They didn’t socialize. They never even stepped out back of the shed for a smoke—none of them smoked. Guys in white shirts and jeans, neat and clean as fucking Mormons. Eyes on the clipboard at all times.

What I figured out was that we were there to sanitize their operation. You know what I mean? So nobody from outside ever got to see the mine. What ever they did there was always out of sight, over the horizon. We were as close as anybody was allowed to get—and all we ever saw were these guys in their unmarked trucks.

Which made me curious.

Bastián, not so much. It was just a job to him, he didn’t give a fuck how the mine worked. Not until one night, one of those nights without a breeze of any kind, I woke up, it might have been three or four in the morning, I couldn’t sleep, so I stepped out of the bunk house to get some air, cold as it gets at night even in summer in the Atacama, and the light was shining again, like a candle on the horizon. So I went and woke up Bastián. There, I told him. See? There’s your goddamn alicanto.

I don’t know what that is, Bastián says, serious for once. Maybe some kind of smelter they’re running. But he knew better than that.

I could tell he was curious. We talked it over now and then for a couple of weeks. But it was busy times. Lots of supplies going into the mine. And something else strange: nothing ever came back the other way. No copper, no ore, nothing raw and nothing refined. One time I asked one of those white-shirt truck drivers how that worked. Did they dig a dry hole or what? And he looked at me like I was something that crawled into his boot during the night. No, he says, we’re still getting it up and running. Meanwhile staring at my name where it was stitched on my shirt. Making notes.

The next day the shift boss took me aside and gave me a lecture about minding my own business, do my work and let the truckers do theirs, etcetera. And if I wanted to keep my job I should shut my mouth and get on with it. Which didn’t really bother me because I’d got to the point where I’d saved enough of my salary to move on. And it looked like there’d be no hard feelings if I did.

Which might have been the end of the story if Bastián hadn’t spent one of those Chilean holidays, I forget which one, Feast of the Virgin, Feast of Peter and Paul, Feast of What ever, in Antofagasta with his buddies from the port where he used to work. He came back with a couple of bottles of Pisco. No drinking allowed in the camp but he bribed a guard. So he and I sat up one Friday night and shared a bottle, out behind the ware houses where there was nobody to see us. Getting steadily drunker and complaining about the job. When up comes that light again, brighter this time. Like a wire strung between the desert and the stars. And somehow we get the stupid idea of taking one of the Toyotas in the motor pool and driving east, at least a little ways, just to see if we can see what’s going on.

You know what they say about curiosity, right? Killed the fucking cat.

Eugene Dowd interrupted his monologue to attend to the actual painting of the car, and the noise of the compressor and the stink of the paint drove Cassie outside. Thomas was fascinated by Dowd’s work on the car, and Cassie agreed to let him watch as long as he stayed behind the glass door of the upstairs office—a ventilator built into the wall of the garage sucked most of the urethane mist out of the building, but Cassie didn’t want him breathing even a little of it. Beth volunteered to stay with Thomas where she, too, could watch Dowd. She had been watching Dowd all day, Cassie had noticed, and Dowd had returned every one of her frequent glances, with interest.

Outside, the sky was cloudless and the air was tolerably warm for December. Cassie walked past Dowd’s noisy wind chimes, around a corner of the garage to a patch of packed brown earth, sheltered from the wind, where a pair of ancient lawn chairs had been set up. She was surprised to find Leo in one of them, reading.

Reading a book. Reading the book her uncle had written, The Fisherman and the Spider. She gaped at the tattered yellow jacket. “That’s mine, Leo—where’d you get that?”

He looked up, startled. “Hey, Cassie.”

“The book,” she said grimly.

“Oh. Sorry. Yeah, it’s yours. I grabbed it from the hotel room in Jordan Landing.”

Cassie had thought the book was lost. She didn’t know whether to be grateful to Leo for saving it or angry that he hadn’t bothered to give it back.

He added, a little sheepishly, “I didn’t think you’d mind…”

She sat down in the brittle webbing of the second chair. She imagined herself falling through, getting her behind stuck in the aluminum struts. That would be graceful. “No. I mean, I guess it’s okay. But I do want it back. You’re actually reading it?”

He raised an eyebrow. “Yeah, this is me, actually reading it. That surprises you?”

“I don’t know. I just never pictured you…”

“Reading books?”

Frankly no, though she was less surprised now than she once would have been. His finger marked his place in The Fisherman and the Spider, about halfway through. She said, “Well, what do you think of it?”

“It’s your uncle’s book, right?”

“Right.”

“About insects.”

“He studied them.”

“But really about the hypercolony.”

She was pleased that he understood this. “In a way, yeah.”

He turned his head up toward the sky. “I was thinking about the way they talked about it in school. The great discovery. Marconi bouncing signals from Newfoundland to France. The radio-propagative layer.”

Cassie nodded.

“But it’s alive. And that’s what your uncle’s book is about, at least between the lines. The hypercolony as a kind of insect hive.”

It was an idea Cassie had struggled with for a long time. She could grasp that the hypercolony was a diffuse cloud of tiny cells surrounding the Earth, each cell functioning like a neuron in a kind of brain. A huge, peculiar brain, surrounding the Earth. Okay, she got that. And it intercepted human radio signals, analyzed them, subtly altered them, and bounced them back in ways people found useful.

All that was basic Society stuff. And since the hypercolony was a sort of brain, she accepted that it might be intelligent. It had to be intelligent, to do what it did. Some early Society theorists had even tried to make contact with it: they had broadcast signals on dormant frequencies, sending out simple mathematical formulas or even questions in basic English, hoping for a response. But no response had ever come.

It was the Society’s mathematicians and cyberneticists and in no small part her uncle who had come up with an explanation: the hypercolony functioned without conscious volition of any kind. The hypercolony didn’t know anything about itself or its environment, any more than a carrot understands the concept of organic farming or the color orange. It just lived and grew, mindlessly exploiting the resources available to it: vacuum, rock, sunlight, other living things. Its powers were in some respects almost godlike, but it was an insect god—mindless and potentially deadly. Her uncle had known that, and though he couldn’t mention the hypercolony by name in his published book, Leo was right: it was there between the lines, on every page.

He gave her a brooding look. “You’d think it would be hard to hate something you can’t see or touch. But it’s not. I do hate the fucking thing. I hate it as much as my father does. He used to say, given that we know what we know, the only honorable thing to do is declare war.”

“In a way, isn’t that what we’ve done?”

“More than in a way. The man I shot… he was a casualty of war. Along with everybody who died in ’07 and everybody who died last month.”

Of course Leo was still dwelling on the man he’d shot. So was Cassie. She thought the act was forgivable even if their defense would never stand up in a court of law. She accepted her share of responsibility, and she knew that in Leo’s place she might have behaved the same way. But the memory was still too awful to contemplate. The blood, the furtive way they had tried to dispose of the body. And in the end, even if they shared responsibility, it was Leo who had pulled the trigger.

He looked at the book in his hand, then offered it to Cassie. She shook her head. “Finish reading if it you want.”

“You ever meet your uncle?”

“A few times. Before ’07. But I don’t remember much about him. Uncle Ethan and Aunt Ris visited sometimes, back when I lived with my parents. He was just a quiet guy who smiled a lot and didn’t say much.” And since Leo had raised the subject, Cassie allowed herself to broach a delicate subject: “My uncle was pretty close to your father. According to Aunt Ris, Werner Beck was pretty much the head of the whole Correspondence Society.”

“I bet she said more than that.”

“Well—”

“It’s okay, Cassie. I know my father has enemies.”

“I’m not sure enemy is the word. She said he was brilliant.” Which was true, though her other words had included arrogant and narcissistic.

“He’s not shy about telling people things they need to hear, whether they want to hear them or not.”

“He wrote to you, right?”

“Once a month. Long letters. He called it my real education.”

“How come you didn’t live with him?”

“After ’07, he figured I wouldn’t be safe anywhere near him. He sent me to live with a cousin of his in Cincinnati. A married couple, no kids, they didn’t know anything about the Society. He paid them pretty generously to look after me. They put me up in a spare room and enrolled me in school. Decent people, but they didn’t really want me there… and it wasn’t where I wanted to be. So as soon as I was legal I bought a bus ticket to Buffalo and got a job washing dishes. I knew there were survivors there who could help me out. My father told me about your aunt and the people she was connected with, how to get in touch with them. He didn’t really approve, but I think he understood.”

“But we weren’t what you hoped we’d be?”

“Well. You know what my father used to say about the Society? He said it was social club when it should have been an army.”

Possibly true. “That changed in ’07,” Cassie said.

“No, not for the better. The murders were obviously meant to drive the Society into hiding, and that’s what happened. We cringed like dogs. Quoting my father. Which is what I found in Buffalo, a bunch of whipped dogs…” He gave Cassie a look that seemed both sheepish and defiant. “Anyway, that’s how it seemed. Don’t do anything rash. Whisper. Mourn, but don’t get angry.”

“Some of us did get angry, Leo. Even if it didn’t show. Some of us were angry all along.”

“Yeah, I suppose so.” He shifted his legs, making the ancient lawn chair creak. The only other sound was the wind furiously tangling the wind chimes. “Anyway, what could I say? My father survived ’07. I wasn’t an orphan. I could hardly complain to someone like—”

“Like me?”

“Someone who’d seen what you’d seen.”

Well, yes, Cassie thought. She had caught one indelible glimpse of her parents’ slack and bloodied bodies before Aunt Ris covered her eyes and pulled her away. You can’t unsee something like that. But what did that buy you? Only bad dreams and guilt. A clinging sadness she could never quite escape.

But anger, too. We never lacked for anger. “Well,” she said, “we’re in the same boat now.”

“Orphans?” Leo asked sharply. “Is that what you mean?”

“No. I mean—”

“I don’t know for sure he’s dead. But whether is or whether he isn’t, he wouldn’t have sent me here unless he wanted me to finish his work.”

“You really think Eugene Dowd can help us do that?”

“Dowd seems to think we’re here to help him. But my father trusted him.”

“To do what?”

“I guess we’ll find out,” Leo said, “when he finishes his story.”

16

_{ON THE ROAD}

SOMEWHERE ON THE TURNPIKE WEST OF Columbus, Ohio, the events of the last few days settled on Nerissa like an unbearable weight. Suddenly breathless, she asked Ethan to pull over. She was out of the car before he finished braking, falling to her knees next to a weed-clogged drainage ditch. A barrel stave had tightened around her chest. Her head felt heavy. The sun was viciously bright, the noise of passing trucks cruelly loud. She put her hands into the yellow grass, leaned forward and vomited up the remains of this morning’s breakfast.

When the spasm passed she shut her eyes and took small sips of the chilly December air. The darkness that formed behind her eyelids was cavernous and oddly comforting. She didn’t move until she felt the pressure of Ethan’s hand on her shoulder.

“Ris? Are you all right?”

Obviously not. But in the sense he meant… well, she was recovering. “Help me up, please, Ethan.”

She leaned into him until her dizziness passed. Back to the car, then, where she rinsed her mouth with bottled water, spitting it onto the verge.

Funny how this feeling had snuck up on her. It wasn’t the mem ory of the sim’s awful death that had triggered it. It wasn’t even the horrific inference she had drawn from her meeting with Mrs. Bayliss, the idea that a human womb could be shanghaied by an alien organism. What had sent her reeling out of the car was simply the thought of her niece and nephew, of Cassie and Thomas, friendless and vulnerable and believing she was dead.

Not that it was exactly a new thought, but she had kept it at a safe distance in the frenzied activity of the past few days. But time, or the drowsy, sun-warmed comfort of the moving car, had lowered her guard.

She allowed herself another sip of water as Ethan steered back into traffic. A pair of eighteen-wheel trucks barreled past, lords of the turnpike on this chilly weekday afternoon. She found herself thinking of the custody hearings back in ’07, held in the aftermath of the massacre. A panel of Family Health and Social Welfare workers had reviewed Nerissa’s suitability as a caregiver for her orphaned niece and nephew. Nerissa had testified to her willingness to make a new home for them, had promised they would receive any counseling or therapy they might need. And those vows had been authentic; she had made them without reservation, though she was less than certain of what FHSW called her “parenting potential.” In the end, the tribunal had expressed more confidence in her ability to raise two kids than she actually felt.

She had always admired her sister’s devotion to her children, even occasionally envied it; but children had never been on Nerissa’s agenda, except in a vague maybe-someday sense. Her career and her troubles with Ethan had rendered the question moot. Then, suddenly, she found herself responsible for two traumatized children. She had taken a leave of absence from the University after the murders and she knew that going back would make her a sitting target, should the killers return. A new city, responsibility for Cassie and Thomas, the unfathomable threat hanging over them all, not to mention her own burden of traumatic memories… some nights she had come awake in the sweaty certainty that she couldn’t handle any of it: the kids would despise her; she would be reduced to poverty; they would all be butchered in their sleep.

But it hadn’t happened that way. The kids had slowly adapted. For months Cassie had covered her ears at the slightest mention of her parents; she had been clingy, reluctant even to walk to school by herself. Slowly, however, her confidence had crept back. And so, in equal measure, had Nerissa’s. It was as if they had learned a silent magic: how to draw strength from each other in a way that left each of them stronger. Thomas, though he was younger than Cassie, had recovered even more quickly. There were difficult moments, of course, sudden and unprovoked outbursts of tears or anger, demands to be taken back to his real home, his real mother… but Thomas had been willing to accept Cassie’s consoling hugs and, later, Nerissa’s. She remembered the first time he had come crying into her arms. The surprising warmth and weight of him, the damp patch his tears left on her shoulder.

Protecting them had become the central business of her life. It was what was left, after so much else had been taken from her. And it was a job for which she possessed, to her surprise, a certain aptitude.

But ultimately she had failed at it. She had been away from home the night the sims came back. And for purely selfish reasons. An evening at the theater with John Vance—Beth’s father, who was one of the Society’s singletons, separated from his wife after ’07. They had seen a Performing Arts Center production of Twelfth Night. Then drinks at John’s place. And then to bed, in the secure knowledge that Cassie could look after Thomas, that it was good for Cassie to feel in charge once in a while, to take on some of the responsibility she was beginning to assume as an adult… and other self-serving rationalizations.

You let your vigilance lapse, Nerissa thought. She had felt safe enough to let a little buried resentment leak out—resentment of a duty she had never wanted but couldn’t refuse; resentment that she had been relegated to a supporting role in the lives of these children rather than a starring role in her own. She had chosen to slake her loneliness in the company of a man for whom she felt nothing more than a passing affection. And as a result Cassie and Thomas were gone. Not dead (please God, not dead), but out there somewhere in the company of Werner Beck’s cocksure son and John Vance’s sullen daughter—bound, in all likelihood, for one of Werner Beck’s safe houses. Assuming Beck himself hadn’t been killed. The sims had been more selective this time around, but surely Beck was one of their primary targets. Because Beck, as Ethan had always insisted, was the heart of the Society. Its mainspring, its motivating force. Its most dedicated and most dangerous member.

The turnpike ribboned through Ohio into Indiana. By dusk the sky had grown clear, the air colder. Outside Indianapolis they passed a local radio station, its broadcast antenna aimed like a steel flower at the meridian, whispering to the radiosphere, which would whisper its message back to the neighboring counties and suburbs… to the entire world, given a powerful-enough signal.

Ethan tuned in the station in time for a newscast. The world was facing a nervous and unusual Christmas. In northern Africa, General Othmani’s forces had encircled and destroyed a brigade of League of Nations peacekeepers. In Europe, a conference on the Balkan crisis had adjourned without reaching an accord. And the Russian Commonwealth and the Pan-Asian Alliance were butting heads over an oil port on the Sea of Okhostsk, with reports of an exchange of artillery fire.

None of these small crises was unusual in itself, but the combination seemed ominous. “Sometimes I wonder if it’s starting to unravel,” Ethan said. “The peace they gave us.”

“Imposed on us. And I’m not sure we should call it peace.”

Pax formicae, she thought. The peace of the anthill.

“If any of what Bayliss said is true—if the hypercolony is infected

and at war with itself—that would obviously affect the way it manages the world.”

“Or else it’ll all be resolved by New Year’s.” Nerissa shrugged. “No way of knowing.”

Then the state and local news. The Indiana legislature had passed a bud get extension. The Farm Alliance was threatening to boycott the Midwest Corn Exchange unless prices stabilized. State Police were participating in the search for four young persons sought in a murder-assault case. The weather would be clear and seasonably cool for the next few days.

“If we drive through the night,” Ethan said, switching off the radio, “I think we can make Werner’s place by morning.”

She had met Werner Beck only once, at a Correspondence Society gathering in Boston before the massacres of ’07. Brief as it was, the meeting had soured her on the Society and helped derail her relationship with Ethan.

The Correspondence Society, true to its paranoid principles, was really two organizations. The majority of its members were academics or scientists who used the mailing list to share unpopular or even whimsical ideas related to their research. For those people it was little more than an academic equivalent of the Masons or the Shriners: a notionally secret social club, useful as a way of networking with other professionals. They weren’t required to take seriously the idea of the radiosphere as a living entity.

Those who did take the idea seriously were more likely to be members of the Society’s inner circle, numbering no more than five hundred individuals in universities and research facilities throughout the world. Invariably, their work had confronted them with evidence they could neither safely publish nor honestly ignore. Ethan, for example. Ethan had been one of those outer-circle Society academics until his work with Antarctic ice cores. He had shared some of his results with Werner Beck, who had pushed him into conducting isolations of the chondritic dust he discovered in his samples. It was Werner Beck who had recruited him into the inner circle.

The inner circle didn’t hold conferences in the conventional sense, but every few years there was an informal gathering somewhere in the world. That year, Beck had booked rooms in a motel in Framingham outside of Boston. It wasn’t necessary to rent function rooms—the Society attendees amounted to six men and two women (four from the U.S., one from Denmark, two from China and one from India); the entire gathering would fit comfortably in a single hotel room. Each delegate was scheduled to present a paper deemed too sensitive for the larger Society mailing list. Ethan would be reporting on his work with the ice cores; Beck, on the cultures he had succeeded in growing from Ethan’s extractions.

Ethan had introduced her to Beck in the motel’s coffee shop. She had expected someone slightly larger than life. And maybe he was, but only in the metaphorical sense: Beck was no taller than Nerissa herself, and she topped out at five and a half feet. His hair was dark and thinning. He wore a beard: a uniform quarter-inch of facial hair so carefully manicured that it had a topiary quality. He dressed casually, in spotless jeans and a white shirt open at the neck, and in contrast to most of the attendees he looked as if he’d spent some time at the gym—broad shoulders, thick upper arms.

His eyes were his most striking feature. There was nothing nervous or tentative about them. He looked at her steadily and with a bluntness that began to make her uncomfortable. Then he smiled. “You must be Mrs. Iverson.”

Ethan, typically, had forgotten to introduce her. “Nerissa,” she said. “Hi.”

“Werner Beck.” He shook her hand briskly and briefly, then turned to Ethan. “Last time we met you were single. You’ve done all right for yourself.”

“Thank you,” Ethan said—a smidgen too obsequiously, Nerissa thought.

“It’s unusual to bring a spouse to one of these events.”

“We’re both on a sort of sabbatical. Well, a vacation. After this weekend we’re headed to Hawaii. Two weeks at Turtle Bay.”

“Sounds nice. Anyway, welcome, Ethan. We have a lot to talk about. Mrs. Iverson, I hope you don’t feel left out. But Boston’s a big city. I’m sure you can keep yourself busy.”

It was a dismissal, and not a particularly gracious one. Nerissa fought the urge to say something condescending in return. She had hoped Ethan might stick up for her, but all he offered was a nervous laugh. “Ris knows the city pretty well—she’s lived here most of her life.”

“I’m sure. Anyway, we have our first gathering this afternoon at one. It’s Wickramasinghe’s session—he’ll be talking about organic inclusions in meteorite fragments. A great lead-up to your work.” Beck’s eyes flicked back to Nerissa. “Nice meeting you, Mrs. Iverson, and I hope to see you again soon.”

“Well?” Ethan asked, after Beck had left the table.

She shrugged. “He’s well-groomed.”

“That’s your impression of him? Well-groomed?”

“A little oily.” Since you ask.

“He’s just trying to make a good impression.”

“On the unexpected spousal baggage?”

“That’s not fair.”

Perhaps not. The Society, Ethan had told her, didn’t have a strict policy on how much information members could share with their families. But it was understood that talking too freely could endanger one’s career—that was why the Society had come to exist in the first place. And much of what the Society’s inner circle had learned would have sounded bizarre or even irrational to an outsider. Nerissa understood that she would have to tread carefully here, perhaps especially around a key player like Werner Beck.

But she resented being treated as an interloper. Or worse, a potential spy. As if she cared what these people discussed at their meetings. As if their ideas would ever be more to her than an unsettling and highly speculative hypothesis.

“Anyhow,” Ethan said, “it’s his ideas that count. And he’s a solid researcher. Since his wife died a few years ago, his work is all he has. And he can afford to devote himself to it.”

“He’s a widower?”

“Raising a son by himself.”

She allowed Ethan to change the subject. They talked about their plans for Oahu. Nerissa imagined a room with bamboo furniture, a breeze, the distant sound of the sea. And herself on a shaded veranda with a drink (something with gin and an umbrella in it) to extinguish any lingering thoughts about the forces that influenced human events.

On Saturday she wandered through the secondhand bookshops in Old Boston. Nerissa found bookstores soothing, especially antiquarian bookstores—the smell of old ink, the muted acoustics. She wanted something smart but not too challenging, and she eventually settled on a tattered second printing of Raymond Chandler’s The Little Sister. Back at the motel she staked out a table by the window of the bar and began to read. She had not reached the end of the first chapter when she became aware of a looming shadow. A woman of, she guessed, forty-something, carrying a drink and blinking from behind an impressively dense pair of eyeglasses. “You’re Ethan’s wife, right?”

Nerissa nodded cautiously.

“I thought so. I saw you with Ethan and Beck the other day.” Her voice was small (birdlike, Nerissa thought) and she spoke with a French accent. “I’m Amélie. Amélie Fournier. I’m one of the—well, you know. I’m with the Society. Do you mind if I sit with you? Or if you’d rather be alone—”

“No, please sit. I’m Nerissa.”

Amélie lowered herself into a chair. “Thank you. I’m playing hooky from the meeting. Is that the right expression? Playing hooky? I find I can endure only so much of staring into the abyss.”

“The abyss?”

“I mean the deep of the sky. And what lives there.” Amélie

wrinkled her face, an expression not quite approximating a smile. “Of course, I don’t know how much Ethan has discussed with you…”

“My husband and I don’t keep secrets.”

“Really? That would be unusual. But of course I shouldn’t be talking about these things at all. Mr. Beck would be upset with me. But I discover I don’t really care. I’m tired of Mr. Beck. I prefer the company of the unenthusiastic. By which I mean someone who is not so highly partisan. Mr. Beck considers himself a warrior. In his eyes we are all unsatisfactory soldiers. Some of us are reluctant to be soldiers at all, much to his disgust. I’m sorry, would you rather talk about something else? I can be a bore when I drink. People tell me so.”

“Not at all. It’s refreshing to get another point of view.”

“As opposed to your husband’s?”

“My husband’s opinion of Mr. Beck is somewhat higher than yours.”

“Yes, I am in a minority. I admit it. I think there are truths Mr. Beck is unfortunately ignoring.”

“Such as?”

Amélie hesitated. She ran a hand through her hair, which was cut in a style Nerissa hadn’t seen before, like sleek dark wings. “Each of us at this meeting represents a certain discipline. Mine is astronomy. I am an astronomer. Have you ever looked through a telescope, Nerissa?”

“Once or twice.”

“Optical telescopes are old-fashioned. Nowadays we look at the sky at invisible wavelengths. Or with photographic plates. The naked eye is an unreliable observer. But I was raised by a man whose hobby was astronomy. We lived in Normandy, in the west of the country. My father owned a large property there. Farmland. Far from the cities. The sky was dark at night. The stars were a constant presence. I became fascinated with the stars, as was my father. He used to say that there was something noble about the act of looking through a telescope. Human beings are small animals on an insignificant planet, but when we look at the sky—when we understand that the stars are distant suns—we begin to encompass an entire universe.

“As a child I was enthralled. Of course, I thought about the possibility of other worlds circling those distant suns. Inhabited worlds, perhaps. Planets perhaps with civilizations like our own, but more primitive or more advanced. Childish fantasies, but even a scientist may entertain such ideas.

“As an adult I discovered that a career in modern astronomy was more prosaic than I expected. My post-graduate project was a study of the propagative layer, the radiosphere, using high-frequency interferometry. My work met with resistance. It was hard to get cooperation or research time on the larger dish antennae. The details don’t matter—a tenured colleague from another university became aware of my work and introduced me to the Correspondence Society.” Amélie smiled ruefully. “Much was explained.”

“You believed what they told you? About the radiosphere being alive?”

“They offered me the evidence and allowed me to draw my own conclusion. Don’t you believe it?”

“I’m not a scientist. I guess you could say Ethan convinced me. His conviction convinced me.”

“Life,” Amélie said, “not of this world, and almost near enough to touch. At first it was only a surmise, but the evidence is now conclusive. Thanks in part to the work of your husband. The small seeds embedded in ancient ice cores. Think of that, a sort of gentle snow of alien life, very diffuse, sifting down from the sky, accumulating over centuries. And not dead, but still in some sense living. We are enclosed in an organism, which facilitates our communication and moves us, as a species, in a certain direction.”

Herds us, Ethan had once said, the way certain ants herd aphids.

“It’s a marvelous, a terrifying, an utterly unpalatable truth.” Amélie waved a hand at the sky—well, the ceiling—and came within an inch of knocking her drink to the floor. “For some years now we have consoled ourselves with the idea that the relationship between ourselves and this entity is symbiotic. Do you know that word? Mutually beneficial. It preserves and enhances the peace of the world, and in return… ah, what it takes in return is a matter of some debate. But Mr. Beck is more pessimistic. He suspects the relationship is purely parasitical. What the hypercolony wants, it will eventually take. Its intervention in our affairs is entirely selfish. If it wants us to be unwarlike, it’s so we won’t develop the weapons we might use to defend ourselves.”

“You think that’s true?”

“I don’t know. The evidence is controversial. But consider the implication, if what Mr. Beck believes is true. There is a form of life that is distributed throughout galactic space, and it depends for its survival on the exploitation of civilizations like our own. What does that mean?”

“I suppose… well, that civilizations like ours must be relatively common.”

“Yes, perhaps. At least common enough to have played a role in the evolution of this entity. This parasitical entity. This successful parasitical entity. The parasite is here, all around us—” Amélie leaned close enough that Nerissa could smell the alcohol on her breath. “But where are its previous victims? Where are these other civilizations like our own? Why haven’t they warned us against it? Why aren’t they here to help us?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it isn’t practical, or maybe they don’t care…”

“Or maybe the predator, having devoured its victim, leaves only a corpse behind.”

The bar was aggressively air-conditioned. Nerissa shivered.

Amélie nodded. “You understand, I think. And this is what has destroyed the plea sure I once took in looking through the telescope. All those wonderful possibilities. But now when I see the stars I think, death. Killing. Nature, red in the tooth…”

“Red,” Nerissa corrected her, “in tooth and claw.” Amélie was quoting Tennyson, whether she knew it or not. A passage about “man,” that Victorian abstraction, Who trusted God was love indeed / And love Creation’s final law—/ Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw / With ravine, shriek’d against his creed…

“‘In tooth and claw.’ Exactly.”

“And you blame Beck for changing the way you look at the sky?”

“Blame Beck? No, not for that.” Amélie smiled bitterly. “No. I blame Mr. Beck for propositioning me very crudely when we were alone in his room, and then belittling my work because I refused his advances. But that’s the kind of man he is.” She stood up suddenly, her chair teetering behind her. “I think Mr. Beck is as deluded as the rest of us. He simply cherishes a more militant delusion. Watch out for your husband, Nerissa. I mean to say, be careful of him. Protect him. Because he seems terribly impressed with Mr. Beck’s ideas. And I think Mr. Beck’s ideas are frankly dangerous.”

Nerissa saw Werner Beck once more that weekend, at a group dinner at the end of the conference. All technical discussion was banned for the duration of the meal. It was meant to be a social evening, though Nerissa was the only woman at the table: Amélie Fourier had booked an early flight to Louis Blériot Airport in Paris.

Conversation was shallow and often awkward. Maybe it hadn’t been a good idea to ban discussion of the single subject these people had in common. What was left? Books, films, politics, trivia. Nerissa said little and allowed her attention to drift, but she was impressed by Beck’s obvious domination of the event. The Correspondence Society was supposedly nonhierarchical and Beck held no official position, but it was Beck who called for menus, Beck who refereed minor disagreements, Beck who had organized the dinner in the first place.

And it was Beck who declared it over as soon as the dessert dishes had been cleared away. He held his hand out to Nerissa as she left with Ethan. “Plea sure meeting you, Mrs. Iverson.” His handshake was firm and his smile radiated a perfect confidence. She managed a smile in return, perhaps not very persuasively.

Later, in their room, she told Ethan what Amélie had said about Beck.

Ethan frowned. “It must be some kind of misunderstanding.”

“Amélie seemed clear on what happened.”

“Her work on microwave echoing was pretty thin gruel. Beck was a little dismissive of it in discussion, but I don’t think he said anything unfair. It was Beck who delivered the bombshell at this conference. He managed to detect signaling mechanisms in chondritic cells in culture.”

“And that’s important?”

“Like pulling down a piece of the sky and putting it under a microscope. If we understand how these cells communicate, it should be possible to monitor that communication or even interfere with it. I mean, if we choose to.”

“And the fact that he propositioned her?”

“Well, did he? He may have said something callous, which she amplified out of, you know, professional jealousy—”

“So she was lying?”

“Come on, Ris! Not necessarily lying, but…” He shrugged impatiently. “And no real harm was done. I don’t know why we’re even discussing this. She produced some trivial work, it got the attention it deserved, and she resented it. Maybe Beck didn’t conduct himself like a perfect gentleman, but even if that’s the case, does it really matter?”

At least take it into consideration, Nerissa thought. Don’t dismiss it out of loyalty to Beck. Don’t make excuses for him just because his research is impressive. But she didn’t say any of those things, only frowned and turned away.

The disagreement cast a shadow over their vacation. Oahu was predictably beautiful. They hiked Mokuleia, they sunned for blissful hours on the white sand of the hotel’s beach. But Nerissa had seen a side of Ethan (and of the Correspondence Society) she didn’t like and couldn’t altogether dismiss. And although the stars over the North Shore were lovely, she was haunted by what Amélie had said. Nature, red in tooth and claw / With ravine, shriek’d against his creed… And against Amélie herself, apparently. Amélie had been one of the first to die in the murders of 2007.

“Ris, wake up.”

For a moment she thought she was back in Hawaii. But no. She had slept in the car. She blinked her eyes against a gray dawn, hardly tropical. When she sat up, every joint in her body voiced a separate complaint.

Ethan had parked in front of a bungalow on some dusty street near a railroad crossing. She began to ask where they were, then realized she didn’t have to. This was one of Werner Beck’s many so-called safe houses, the address of which he had given Ethan in the letter that had arrived the day they left the farm house. Evidence of heightened radiosphere activity, Beck had written, take all precautions, you can reach me at this address.

And the man just now stepping out the door and down the porch steps was Werner Beck himself. He hadn’t changed much in the years since Nerissa had last seen him. His posture remained militarily erect, though his hair and beard were grayer. He wore loose khakis and an untucked red flannel shirt. And he was cradling a shotgun, though he offered a tight smile when Ethan rolled down the window.

Please let them be here, Nerissa thought. Please let them be inside the house, Cassie and Thomas, and Beck’s son, Leo. Let them be watching from a window. Let them come running out when they see me. She opened the car door. She stood up. Ethan did the same.

“You’d better get inside,” Werner said.

And from the house there was nothing. Only a pale light, an empty porch, a motionless door, the vacant silence.

17

_{DOWD’S GARAGE}

EUGENE DOWD’S SPRAY PAINT HAD TURNED the car Leo had stolen from white to metallic blue. With its windows and trim still masked it looked almost fake to Cassie’s eyes, a trompe l’oeil automobile, a magic trick at the point of unveiling. Dowd said he would give it a buff and a clear coat in the morning—there wasn’t time for anything better, and the only purpose of all this work was to make sure the car no longer fit its original description. A hasty coat of paint and new plates was the best he could do. Then they would have to get on the road.

Of course Cassie wanted him to finish his story about Chile, about the desert called the Atacama and the strange lights he had seen there. But Dowd wasn’t in the mood. Tomorrow, he said. He talked better when he had something to do with his hands. In the meantime he meant to drive his truck into Salina to pick up supplies, and did anybody want to come with him?

Beth volunteered at once. Dowd nodded and escorted her out of the garage.

Cassie, Leo and Thomas adjourned to Dowd’s office upstairs, where the grimy window was orange with the glow of the sunset. They were too hungry to wait for Dowd and Beth to get back, so they assembled dinner out of the leftovers in Dowd’s refrigerator. Leo switched on Dowd’s little transistor radio and let it play for a while—mostly Christmas music, since that was the next big holiday on the calendar. The tinkling bells and choral arrangements were cheerful for a time, but after dark the music began to seem as sad and distant as a signal from a ship at sea. Cassie wondered whether she would ever celebrate Christmas again. Aunt Ris had not been particularly religious, but every December she dragged a dwarfish pine tree up the stairs to the apartment and installed it in a tin basin over a white sheet, where its fallen needles would collect in prickly drifts. Cassie supposed the apartment was empty now—past-due notices in the overflowing mailbox, food rotting in the refrigerator, dust sifting out of the still air.

Leo switched off the radio. Thomas sat glumly at the window. “Wish I had something to read,” he said.

Cassie agreed. Even a magazine would have been better than nothing, but a search of Dowd’s premises had proved fruitlesss. “All we have,” she said, “is one of Uncle Ethan’s books, and Leo’s got dibs on that.”

“I could read it out loud,” he said.

Cassie had to stifle a laugh when she realized he was serious. It seemed comical to her, the idea of chain-smoking Leo Beck reading to them from a work of popular science. But it was a nice thought. (And, come to that, when was the last time she’d seen him smoking a cigarette? He must have finished his last pack, and he hadn’t asked Beth to pick up more.)

Thomas seemed intrigued. “Really?”

“Yeah,” Leo said. “Sure.” He flashed Thomas a smile, then opened the book to its first chapter. “Consider a fisherman—let’s say, a young man who owns his own boat and weaves his own nets….”

In Leo’s sonorous and surprisingly confident voice it sounded more like a story than an essay. Cassie watched Leo’s face as he read, the attention he paid to the text, the way he glanced up from the page to make eye contact with Thomas, who leaned forward with obvious interest. It was a charitable act, she thought. A nice thing to do. Apparently, somewhere inside Leo Beck was a man Cassie might be able to respect.

Dowd and Beth returned after midnight, both of them a little drunk. Dowd left a box of canned goods by the door and brought a few perishables up to the refrigerator in his office. “Supplies for the trip,” he said, and stalked out again before Cassie could ask the obvious question: What trip? Where are we going?

Leo and Thomas and Cassie had already unrolled their sleeping bags on the floor of the office. “You’re closest to the switch,” Leo said. “Will you turn out the light?”

“Okay, but what if Beth comes in later?”

“She can find her way around.”

From downstairs, the sound of hectic laughter.

A few miles down that road—and it wasn’t much of a road, just gravel and dirt blown over with sand—me and Bastián realized we were doing something stupid.

Morning had dawned cold, with a few flakes of snow drifting from a thickly overcast sky. The air in the garage smelled of urethane and stale beer and motor oil. Dowd had stripped the car of its masking and now he had it up on a lift, inspecting the tires and undercarriage in case it became necessary to drive through bad weather. On their way to where, exactly, Dowd still hadn’t said.

Stupid because we didn’t know what we were getting into, and stupid because we’d almost for sure be fired. But it didn’t matter. It was one of those situations where you just say fuck it. Fuck the job, fuck management. The pay was decent but living in a bunk house the middle of the world’s driest desert, staring at the salares and the cordillera all day, makes you a certain kind of crazy. I don’t know about Bastián, but I was ready to go back where people actually lived. See something vertical for a change. Talk to a woman who wasn’t an overseer or a forklift driver.

So we drove on even after the Pisco ran out. Bastián started talking about copper mining. He said he had a cousin who had worked at Chuquicamata and Escondida. What ever these people were doing out here, he said, they weren’t mining copper. To mine copper you need water, but there was no river or aquifer. Big tanks of water had come through our compound, but not enough for serious ore extraction. And if they were doing heap-leaching there would have been bulk shipments of sulfuric acid and chemicals like that. Hell, we should have seen the tailing dams by now. Or at least smelled them. Because we were getting close.

What we did see was all kinds of garbage on the side of the road. That’s the thing about the desert, nothing rots or gets overgrown or sinks into the earth. You throw something away, it just sits there. We drove past these little piles of fractured aluminum tubing and cut metal and broken machine parts and colored glass and cracked ceramic insulators and shit like that. It was past midnight, there was a half-moon in the sky and all kinds of stars, so it looked pretty strange, sort of Martian, if you know what I mean—these trash piles with rebar and steel girders sticking out. Six feet high, some of them, then ten feet high, until we were driving down an alley made of trash, and Bastián slowed up and started to look worried. Eugene, he says, this is not a normal operation. No shit, I said.

I don’t want to be seen here, he says. What ever these people are doing, they don’t want company. Well, I say, and it was probably the Pisco talking, I came out here to see and I mean to see.

Okay, but on foot, Bastián says. Toyota makes too much noise.

Okay. So we get out and climb up an embankment that’s mostly industrial refuse. Slipping on sheet plastic and grabbing rebar like it was tree branches, all in all probably making more noise than we would have if we just kept driving. But it turns out Bastián picked a good place to stop, because from the top of that ridge we could see the whole installation.

If you want to call it that. The compound. What ever. That’s no mine, Bastián says. Yeah, I said, that’s pretty fuckin’ obvious.

It was a patch of desert the size of a small town, with this trash heap around it like the side of a bowl. Most of the buildings in it were long sheds, tin roofs, plywood or cinderblock walls, no marks on them. In the middle there was a tower, not very tall and kind of squat, holding up what looked like a ten or twelve big mirrors arranged like the petals of a flower. You could tell they were mirrors because they reflected the lights from the buildings and also the stars overhead. Real industrial-looking. Around it there was a bunch of pumps and pressure tanks full of god-knows-what and fat electrical cables, all told taking up about as much space as a regulation football field. That was where the light came from, the light we saw all the way back at the depot where we worked.

“How do you know that’s where it came from?” Thomas suddenly asked. Dowd gave him a shut-the-fuck-up look and paused. Cassie put a protective arm around her little brother.

We knew because it came on while we were watching. Nearly blew us back down the trash heap. I mean it wasn’t loud or anything, there wasn’t any noise at all except what might have been a compressor buried somewhere underground. But bright, oh, Jesus! Maybe thirty seconds before I could see anything but the glare. Bastián put his head down, but I couldn’t help sneaking looks. The beam of light went straight up, and it didn’t spread out like a spotlight, it was straight as a pencil all the way up to where it disappeared. The air started to smell electric, like hot metal and burning insulation.

Bastián said in a sick little voice he wanted to get back in the Toyota and go home. And I thought that was a good idea. Because with all that light we were pretty conspicuous, and worse… I could see things moving. Moving toward us. Look, I said.

People down there, he says. Anyway we guessed they were people. Between the glare and the shadows it was hard to tell. The way they moved, they might have been animals. Big ones. So. Come on, he says, let’s get the fuck out of here. So we scramble down the dark side of the trash heap, half-blind, tripping over shit. I cut myself on a piece of sheet metal and didn’t even feel it till later. Still got the scar—see?

Dowd lifted his T-shirt to expose his torso. The scar ran at right angles to the staves of his ribs, a pale irregular line.

Then Bastián says stop, I hear something. So we stand still. The wind had come up, so I could hear scraps of roofing paper and torn plastic rattling in the trash pile, plus industrial sounds from the compound, that compressor or what ever it was beating like a drum, and over that—this is what Bastián was talking about—a kind of scrabbling sound, like a dog might make digging through garbage. Getting louder. Bastián looks up at the ridgeline of the trash heap and kind of gasps, and I look where he’s looking, and there’s this, uh, thing up there—

“What do you mean?” Leo asked. “What kind of thing?”

Dowd gazed abstractedly at a torque wrench he had picked up.

Well, that’s a good question. I don’t know what else to call it. It was something about halfway between an ape, a spider, and a Swiss army knife.

Thomas emitted a bark of laughter, more nerves than anything else. Dowd ignored him.

Moved like a spider or a crab. Had about that many legs. But it bent up at the middle, I mean it had a kind of a waist, and arms above that, but not hands—more like tools, blades and pincers and shit like that. And it had a head, which was the only human thing about it. Not a human head exactly. But eyes, a mouth.

So it comes down the side of that trash pile, headed straight for Bastián. Bastián starts looking around for something he can use to defend himself. Grabs a piece of rebar that’s sticking up but it’s buried too deep, he’s like desperately tugging on this iron rod, doesn’t take his hand off it until the thing is on top of him. Then he tries to back up but he’s on a slope and he can’t move fast enough and the thing just—well, it basically took him apart. Three quick moves. Snip snip snip. Three pieces of Bastián rolled past me, leaving blood trails.

Then it came for me, but I’d had a little more time get ready. Or else I just got lucky—the Lucite rod I grabbed out of the trash had about the weight and heft of a baseball bat. The thing had long arms and those fingers, or blades, or claws, were fast as lightning, I got a couple more scars I could show you but I’d have to drop my pants—anyway I managed to bring that rod down on the thing’s head, maybe not hard enough to kill it, I don’t know, but maybe I did, it dropped like all its strings had been cut and I proceeded to move the fuck elsewhere.

Got to the Toyota. Did a crazed U-turn and as soon as I’m pointed the right direction I see a half-dozen more of those things in the mirror, gaining on me. Stepped on the gas so hard I nearly ran the fucking vehicle off the fucking road. Kicked up a big cloud of dust and sand, which in the glare of that light was like a smokescreen.

The next thing I see is in front of me, and this time at least it’s a human being, a guy in jeans and a white shirt standing in the middle of the road trying to flag me down. Which was almost reassuring, except the guy has a pistol in a holster and he’s starting to reach for it. I mean, to me he looked like a mall cop. But what am I gonna do, pull over? So I stand on the gas pedal.

The guy looked weirdly calm, and I could see him real clear in that freaky light, trying to level his pistol before the Toyota hit him. Like it was a race between the pistol and the Toyota. The Toyota won. I hit him full-on.

Which pretty near killed me. Any of you ever been in a car when it runs into a large animal, maybe a deer? No air bags on that vehicle. No seat belts. If my legs hadn’t caught on the steering wheel my head would have gone through the windshield. As it was I took a nasty crack on the dashboard. Lost control. The vehicle went up on two wheels, almost turned over. It was halfway up the embankment before I got control of it again. Big dent in the front end and the engine making a sound like a circular saw with a bent blade.

But the mall guard was dead. I knew that because he was all over the fucking windshield. He pretty much exploded on contact. Green shit everywhere. I mean I had to turn on the wipers just so I could see. Clots of red and yellow, yeah, like blood and I guess body fat, but mostly green—I guess you know what I’m talking about.

“He was a simulacrum,” Thomas piped up, needlessly.

Yeah, a sim. But obviously I didn’t know that then. It was just more weirdness. I was being chased by spiders with blades for hands, Bastián was dead, the mall guard was made of snot, and all I wanted was to be anywhere else in the world but this fucking desert. Kept my foot on the gas even when smoke started coming out from under the hood. Long as the wheels turned. One eye on the mirror at all times.

Pretty soon they switched off that tall beam of light. And I killed the Toyota’s lights and drove by the moon, just to be less conspicuous. I expected to be chased, but that didn’t happen. At least not right away. And then I thought, well, where do I go? Back to the depot? Tell an overseer I totaled a company vehicle and by the way Bastián was cut in three pieces by a giant crab?

Since there was nobody on the road back of me far as I could see—and in the Atacama that’s a long way, even at night—I stopped the vehicle and tried to take inventory and come up with some kind of plan. Took off my shirt and tied it around my ribs to stop the bleeding. Obviously the Toyota wasn’t going to make it much farther. Smoke kept coming even when I turned the engine off. I got out and opened the trunk. Found a spare tire—useless—a tire iron, the four-way kind—also pretty useless—and a jack. The jack had a detachable steel handle, which was better than nothing, so I took that. A knife would have been better. Even a box cutter. Anything. But the jack handle was the best I could do.

Then I rolled the Toyota off the road and pointed it across the salt flats, got the engine running—barely—put the transmission in neutral, braced the tire iron against the gas pedal, put it in first gear and jumped the fuck out. The vehicle rolled out into desert on a slow curve, probably would have come right back to me except the engine died when it was a couple of hundred yards off in the flats. Engine caught fire. Pretty soon it looked like a bonfire, burning out there. I hoped it looked like I’d driven off-road and maybe died in the fire. Or at least that somebody might think that from a distance. Then I hunkered down behind the little dirt-and-pebble embankment at the side of the road, which was the only thing to hide behind, which wasn’t much.

Still trying to make a plan. The moon was close to setting and dawn was about an hour away. If more mall guards showed up I thought I might have a chance, but if a posse of those spidery things came down the road I figured I’d be better off slitting my own throat before they did me the favor… But then I saw headlights in the distance.

It was just one truck. A four-wheel-drive Ford with roll bars and a pickup bed. It slowed down, probably because the driver saw the Toyota burning like a motherfucker out there on the salt flats. Stopped a few yards away from where I was hiding. Looked like there was two guys inside. One of ’em gets out. He’s a mall guard—same clothes, same pistol on his hip. Flashlight in his right hand. He’s looking down at the road, shining that light on the gravel, checking out the tire tracks where the Toyota veered into the salare. And every step brings him a little closer to me.

So while he’s staring at the ground I get up and run at him. All I have on my side is surprise. He sees me coming, of course. He drops the flashlight. Reaches for his pistol. But I swing the jack handle before he even touches the weapon. He dodges real quick, but I manage to stun him. So I hit him again, a home-run swing to the side of his head, which drops him like a bag of sand. I go down on my knees and take the pistol out of his holster.

In those days I didn’t know a lot about firearms, but I’d handled my daddy’s old .45 a few times. So I switch off the safety and pray the fucking thing’s loaded, because the second guy is getting out of the Ford in a hurry, and he’s definitely armed and dangerous. I get off one shot, which goes through the Ford’s windshield. Useless. Second shot clips the guy’s shoulder, which turns him around. I’m up and running, he’s still trying to bring his weapon up though his arm don’t work right, third shot is to the head and boom, he’s down.

Another head shot for each mall guard, just to make sure. Which causes blood and green goo to leak all over my shoes.

Then I get in their truck and drive. Full tank, reliable vehicle, and by this time I’m so high on adrenaline I start to feel pretty good about myself, all things considered. Back of me I can see more headlights, but I’m way ahead of ’em. I blow past the depot where Bastián and I worked, and by the time the sky gets light I’m halfway to San Pedro de Atacama and if anybody’s following they’re well out of sight.

In San Pedro I traded the Ford to a guy no-questions-asked for his little piece-of-shit ten-year-old Hudson, which for some reason there are a lot of in the Atacama, somebody must’ve opened a dealership once… a plain dumb car, which I managed to drive all the way to Antofagasta before its tranny seized up. Laid low for a while, did day labor at the puerto until I could afford a plane ride back to the USA. Back home I spent a year or so trying to chase all this shit out of my head with Jack and Coke, hold the Coke, until I shot off my drunken mouth to that writer. After which Werner Beck showed up and more or less explained things to me.

And that’s my story.

“But that doesn’t explain anything,” Leo protested.

“What do you need explained?”

“The light in the desert? The spider things?”

“You should ask your daddy about all that, Leo. Assuming you ever see him again.”

“Also, what’s in the back of your van that’s so important?”

“Your daddy should’ve mentioned that, too.” Dowd grinned, displaying a row of crooked teeth. “You could call it a secret weapon. Or part of one.”

“And you keep talking about getting on the road. Road to where?”

“Do you really have to ask?”

Leo shook his head. “This is crazy.”

Dowd’s grin expanded. “Amen, brother,” he said. “No argument from me.”

18

_{JOPLIN, MISSOURI}

ETHAN’S FIRST CONCERN WAS FOR Nerissa, who was hugely disappointed to discover that Cassie and Thomas and Leo hadn’t shown up at Werner Beck’s safe house.

Ethan was disappointed too, of course. But Ris seemed to lose all the fierce energy she had been drawing on for days. She looked suddenly years older, and the tone she took with Beck was querulous and irritable. “So where are they—do you have any idea where they are?”

Beck escorted them to a plain pine table in the kitchen of this small, plain house. “Sit down,” he said.

“And Leo! He’s your son, for Christ’s sake! Are you telling me you can’t find him?”

“We made plans for this contingency.”

“What plans? What do you mean?”

“If Leo’s doing what I told him to do, we should be able to catch up with him. And if Cassie and—what’s the boy’s name?”

Nerissa shot him a poisonous look. “Thomas.”

“If Cassie and Thomas are with him, that will be your opportunity to take them out of harm’s way. But obviously, Mrs. Iverson, I don’t know with any certainty where any of them are right now. I can’t snap my fingers and make them appear in front of you. You need to exercise some patience.”

“Do you care to explain any of that?”

“I’m as concerned about Leo as you are about your niece and nephew, and I’ll do everything I can to guarantee their safety. The situation is complex, and I’d be happy to talk about it, but in the meantime maybe you’d like to have a shower and a change of clothes? No offense, but you look like you could use it. I’ll put together a hot meal for all of us as soon as you’re refreshed. How about that?”

It was testimony to her fatigue that she sighed and nodded. Beck told her how to find the bathroom.

“I understand why you brought her here,” he said when she left the room. “But it’s frankly a little awkward.”

Ethan didn’t want to get into that discussion, at least not yet. “How many houses do you own, Werner?”

“Enough. They’re only tools. You could say, weapons of war.”

“The sims came for you, didn’t they?”

“I got out of my place in Illinois minutes ahead of them. I’d been there too long in any case—I knew it was probably compromised. I was packed and ready to go when they came to the door. They didn’t see me leave.”

Ethan had heard speculation about Beck and his money—especially his money—for years before Beck confided in him. It was rumored that Beck had patented some useful invention. Or that he had inherited a fortune back in the 1990s. Or that he had criminal connections. Or all three.

That he possessed both deep pockets and useful connections was undeniable. It was Beck who had organized and paid for the annual gatherings of Society members; it was Beck who had funded key research projects when educational institutions backed out; and after the murders of 2007 it had been Beck who helped out the survivors and their families, with cash and when necessary with goods otherwise unobtainable: new names, social security numbers, passports.

Not to mention his apparently inexhaustible supply of safe houses, properties he owned but kept unoccupied so that he could relocate himself or others on a moment’s notice. More than one Society member had called Beck paranoid, and maybe they were right. But it was, Ethan thought, at least a well-funded paranoia.

“The thing is,” Beck said, “you more or less walked into a war zone.

“The war came to us. And you supplied the address, Werner.”

“Because we need to stay in touch. But I didn’t expect you to turn up on the doorstep.”

“It seemed like logical thing to do, given that Cassie and Thomas are traveling with Leo.”

“I understand. But the situation is more complicated than you realize. I’ve been working with people who aren’t part of the Society. The Society was never more than one aspect of this war, Ethan. You can think of the Society as a kind of intelligence service, gathering information about the enemy. That’s good and useful work. But wars have to be fought. And they have to be fought by soldiers, not scholars.”

Ethan sat back in his chair as Beck got up to make coffee. The coffee machine on the faux-marble counter looked as if Beck had bought it yesterday. And maybe he had. The house itself still smelled untenanted, redolent of stale air and the chemical exhalations of undisturbed carpets and furniture. Ethan had a momentary vision of Beck as the kind of furtive animal that nests in abandoned buildings. But he looked martially efficient as he filled the machine’s reservoir and dropped a filter into its basket. He was fifty years old, Ethan guessed, maybe older, but he could have been a weatherworn drill sergeant, still able to hike as far as any recruit and count off twice as many pushups. “You always were unhappy with the Society,” Ethan said. In fact Beck’s private letters had so often dripped with contempt for his colleagues that Ethan occasionally wondered why Beck bothered with them at all.

“Well, I don’t really blame the Society. So much of what we believed was essentially speculative. Before you turned up those ice-core inclusions all we really had was some anomalous data, a history of academic persecution, and a mother lode of surmise. The Society connected the dots, and what emerged was this frankly ludicrous idea, that the radio-propagative layer was also an organism. From elsewhere. From outer space. Even before ’07, nobody wanted to say that out loud. A few of the old lions took it seriously—Fermi, Dyson, Hoyle—but even those guys never contemplated doing anything about it.”

“What could they do?”

“As I said, I don’t blame them. You learn to fly under the radar. Fine. But there’s something to be said for facing facts. And since 2007 we’ve been forced to face a few.” Coffee began to seep through the filter and drip into the pot, a metronomic sound. “Or anyway, I have. You want anything harder than cream in your coffee? You look like you could use it.”

“No. Thank you.” Ethan cleared his throat. “I was seven years in Vermont, living in a cabin in the woods. Does that count as facing facts?”

“You killed some sims, you said?”

He had already given Beck a partial account of events at the farm house. “Four altogether.”

“Well, good. You did what you had to. But that’s self-defense. You were planning for the next attack, but not beyond it.”

“I managed to survive.”

“Right, but what now? What next? Find a new place to hide? Somewhere even deeper in the woods?”

Ethan shrugged.

“I wasn’t willing to settle for that,” Beck said. “What I’ve done these past seven years is make contact with people outside the Society, people who’ve had direct experience of the hypercolony or the sims.”

“I wasn’t aware such people existed.”

“You think it’s only scientists and scholars who can draw an inference or trip over a dangerous piece of knowledge? Think about it. I have reason to believe the sims constitute a tiny fraction of the human population, far less than one in a million. But there are at least a few doctors and coroners who’ve examined unusual bodies. Police officers who’ve witnessed perplexing deaths. And plenty of people who asked awkward questions and received unsatisfying or threatening answers. I made it my business to find those people.”

“How?”

“All sorts of ways. Small-town and local newspapers are a good resource. Local stories usually make it to print before they can be filtered through the radiosphere—the copy goes straight to the composing desk. The press services would never pick up an item about a traffic accident that left green matter all over the road, or, if they did, the story would get lost in transmission—but local papers often publish it.”

“So you run down believe-it-or-not stories in rural newspapers?”

“Much more than that. I have contacts on three continents. I’ve been able to put together a network of people who understand what we’re dealing with—understand it viscerally, not just theoretically—and who are motivated to take action.”

“What kind of action?”

“Every living thing is vulnerable, Ethan. Even the hypercolony.”

“You honestly think you’ve discovered a way to hurt it?”

“If it couldn’t be hurt it would never have expended so much effort attempting to hurt us.”

“Do you realize what you’re admitting?”

Ethan looked up, startled: Nerissa stood in the kitchen doorway, wearing fresh clothes and carrying a towel. Beck displayed a thin-lipped flush of irritation, quickly suppressed. “I hope you’re feeling better, Mrs. Iverson. What is it you think I’m admitting?”

“That you provoked it—the hypercolony. It isn’t just afraid of what we might know, it’s afraid of what you might do with that knowledge.”

“If that’s true, I hope its fears are fully justified.”

“And the people who died?”

“I didn’t kill them.”

“You’ve involved your own son in this.”

“I could hardly exempt him.”

“And Thomas and Cassie?”

“Please don’t misunderstand. I want them out of harm’s way as much as you do. Your niece and nephew are of no use to me.”

Ethan let Nerissa tell the story of the sim Winston Bayliss: what he had said, how he had died, and especially what they had discovered when they visited his home in Montmorency. “Mrs. Bayliss had had recent surgery, so she must have been human. But her son was a sim. How is that possible? Do you know anything about that?”

Beck was silent for so long a time that Ethan wondered whether he might refuse to answer. Then he said, “I can show you some recent research. You too, Ethan. This is work you haven’t seen. Come with me.”

They followed Beck to the small living room of this small house and waited as he sorted through the contents of a cardboard filing box stashed behind the sofa. He extracted a manila folder and put it on the low coffee table. Ethan and Nerissa sat down while Beck pulled up a chair. “I should warn you. Some of the photographs are graphic.”

The folder contained rec ords of the work of an English veterinarian named Wyndham. According to Beck, Wyndham had been culturing pseudochondritic cells to explore their interaction with living tissue. For that purpose he had equipped a laboratory with cages of white mice and a few larger animals.

He had begun by introducing the foreign cells to cultivars of yeasts, fungi and bacteria, without any useful result. Tissue samples from metazoans were slightly more responsive, but the cultures quickly became necrotic.

When Wyndham injected the pseudochondritic cells directly into living mice, the effect was quickly lethal—a simultaneous eruption of multiple aggressive tumors. (The file contained a photograph of a euthanized mouse on a dissection board: the tumors with which its body was riddled looked to Ethan like bloody raspberries.) But when Wyndham dosed the creatures with the same cells in an aerosol preparation—when he put the mice in a sealed chamber and allowed them to inhale dry, extracted spores—they showed no obvious ill effects over weeks and even months.

Not that they were unaffected. Wyndham’s dissections revealed that the foreign cells had migrated to the reproductive system of the mice. Gametes of both sexes were significantly altered. Under the microscope (and here was another, thankfully less visceral photo), haploid cells appeared fatter and included new and unusual organelles. “But the truly significant effect,” Beck said, “was on the next generation.”

Another photo of a dissection—a messy one. Nerissa made a disgusted sound and recoiled. Ethan was queasily reminded of what he had seen after the raid on his farm house.

Once again the dead mouse had been splayed on a dissection board. It possessed what appeared to be a complete set of internal organs, reduced in size and displaced to the borders of the abdomen. The bulk of the body cavity was occupied by a gelatinous green mass, some of which had already liquefied and begun to drain away as the photograph was taken. Tendril of this mass passed into and among the otherwise normal organs. A partial dissection of the skull revealed a hollow sphere of neural matter surrounding the same gelatinous green core.

“God, enough!” Nerissa said, grimacing.

Beck gathered up the photographs. “This would appear to be how sims are created. Pseudochondritic cells are shed by the orbital mass of the hypercolony. Some fraction of them survive entry into the Earth’s atmosphere. Counting the enclosures in the ice cores lets us estimate the number of spores reaching the Earth’s surface in an average year. Inevitably, some small fraction of those spores will be inhaled by animals or human beings. Assuming even a single aspirated cell is able to alter all the gametes in a given individual, and given the density and distribution of fertile adult humans across the globe, there can’t be more than two or three hundred sims in all of North America—maybe four thousand altogether on the planet. Plus a population of altered animals, probably irrelevant but worth taking into consideration.”

Ethan said, “And the sims… are they fertile?”

“Do they breed more sims? No. Wyndham’s mice were sexually functional but genetically sterile. So were his dogs and other higher mammals. There are more photos—”

“No,” Nerissa said.

“Wyndham refused to work with primates, but we have every reason to believe the results would have been the same.”

“And these animals were otherwise normal?”

“Functionally and behaviorally. There was no way to tell a normal mouse from a sim, except with a scalpel.”

“Then Mrs. Bayliss wasn’t lying,” Nerissa said. “She really did give birth to that thing.”

Beck took two more photographs from his files. Ethan was relieved to see that they were micrographs, not images from a dissection table. “We’ve learned more about how the spores operate on the cellular level—this should interest you, Ethan.”

Whoever had produced these images must have had access to some very sophisticated equipment, maybe one of the new scanning electron microscopes, a technology that had only just become available when Ethan began to isolate ice-core specimens. “It’s a busy little factory,” Beck said. “But it would have to be, wouldn’t it, when you consider what these things are capable of. Some of its chemical constituents are familiar enough. The so-called genetic molecules: nitrogen, carbon, phosphorous. Purines, pyrimidines. Plus arsenic, some trace metals. But what stands out is the level of organization in the cell. These unfamiliar filamentous structures, you see them? Fractally folded threads of conductive carbon embedded in a sub-membrane, with dendritic extensions that seem to affect every part of the cell in some fashion—”

“Some of us aren’t biologists,” Nerissa said. “If you want me to understand this, you’ll have to dumb it down a little.”

“The details don’t matter as much as the function. Think about what these cells do. They travel immense distances through the vacuum of space. They duplicate themselves—at least so we surmise—by absorbing minerals and trace elements from the rocky or icy surface of asteroids, comets, planetesimals. They do this at temperatures far below the freezing point of water and with no driving force apart from faint sunlight and slow catalytic chemistry. They communicate with one another over enormous distances by generating microbursts of narrow-band radio-frequency energy. Which would be remarkable enough. But they do something that’s even more impressive. In our case, they tacked inward toward the sun and occupied a stable orbit around the Earth. Ethan’s research suggests they were present as much as forty thousand years ago, possibly longer. And once their numbers reached some critical threshold, they began to function as a coherent network. Do you understand what that means, Mrs. Iverson?”

“Only vaguely.”

“Their intercommunication became complex. The pseudochondritic cells interact with each other much the way brain cells do. And as soon as our species began to generate radio signals of its own, the so-called radiosphere started to function as a vast distributed transceiver, relaying radio waves around the globe but also analyzing those signals, making of itself an analytical computer more sophisticated than any such device we’ve ever dreamed of building.”

“So are they some form of life, or are they machines?”

“At the chemical level all living things can be construed as machines. We have no evidence that anyone designed these objects, though it’s possible. The likeliest scenario is that they evolved over an immense span of time and gradually acquired the characteristics they now possess. On the cellular level they’re immensely sophisticated; more importantly, the network they form is itself a unitary entity. The hypercolony. The hive, to borrow Ethan’s description. It’s the hypercolony that has learned to comprehend and manipulate human society, and it’s the hypercolony we have to destroy.”

If that was even remotely possible. Ethan inspected the micrographs. Cyberneticists had estimated that just one of these tiny cells was capable of faster and subtler calculations than even the massive transistorized computers operated by insurance companies or the Internal Revenue Service. The Society’s physicists thought the processing must operate at a deep, fundamental level of reality—the “quantum” level, a term Ethan didn’t entirely understand. But a more immediate question was vexing him. “Why haven’t I seen these micrographs before?”

“Why should you have?”

“Well, the Society—”

“Ethan, this isn’t the work of the Society. Wyndham is an independent researcher. I underwrote his work myself.”

“Nevertheless, I would have liked to have seen them.”

“I chose to limit the exposure of this information.”

“Why?”

“In order to protect it. Isn’t that obvious? For years we assumed the precautions the Society took were good enough to hide our work from the hypercolony. But the events of 2007 proved that theory disastrously wrong. We have no secrets and probably never did. The only conclusion I can draw is that the Society itself has been corrupted and infiltrated.”

“So you set up another circler of researchers.”

“More than one, and I’ve put up firewalls between them. If one

circle is compromised, the others remain secure. And where the Correspondence Society was basically a club for frustrated scholars, my people are better motivated.”

“Why, what motivates them?”

“Anger,” Beck said. “Fear.”

Beck repeated his promise that he would take Ethan and Nerissa to rendezvous with Leo (and presumably with Cassie and Thomas). But he refused to say anything more specific, except that it would be “a long trip.” Nerissa continued to press, which made for a sullen evening meal, after which she and Ethan retired to the upstairs bedroom.

The room was as spare as every other room in this barely-inhabited house. A single bed, muslin curtains over the window, a layer of undisturbed dust on the uncarpeted parquet floor. “He’s insane,” Nerissa said.

“He’s been right in the past.”

“I notice that’s not a denial.”

“If he’s paranoid, is that so hard to understand? Given the life he’s led?”

“A ridiculously privileged life. Heir to millions.”

True, but the whole story, at least as Ethan understood it, was more complex. Yes, Beck’s parents had been wealthy. Beck’s father had immigrated from Poland in the 1960s with a degree in engineering, some experience at the Nagórski plant in Starachowice, and an ambition to work with aircraft. Within a few years he had generated three modestly profitable patents and owned a small manufacturing facility in Portland that supplied parts to Boeing. He had married an American woman who died of pancreatic cancer after giving birth to their only child, Werner, and he had never remarried.

Beck’s father had been frugal by nature and had raised his son that way. When he died at the age of fifty-seven, he left Werner Beck a staggeringly diverse portfolio of investments, sole ownership of a successful company that was about to go public, and a work ethic only slightly less demanding than the disciplines practiced by Tibetan monks.

The fortune hadn’t diverted Beck from his academic career, which he had conducted with the same Spartan intensity. When Beck discovered the Correspondence Society he had immediately diverted some of his wealth to the support of clandestine research. And if Beck felt his generosity entitled him to a certain amount of deference, a little centrality in an otherwise decentralized organization, who could say he was wrong?

In 1990 Beck had married a former student who gave birth to one child, Leo, and who had little to do with the Society. She died in a car accident when Leo was very young. Her death must have been traumatic for Werner, but that was pure surmise on Ethan’s part: Beck had never spoken about his feelings and had seemed reluctant even to mention the loss. But it was after the death of his wife that Beck severed all contact with conventional academia and began to devote himself exclusively to the Society’s business.

“And the only reason you know any of this,” Nerissa said, “is that Beck told you. He could have been lying.”

“Why would he lie?” The money was real, Ethan thought. The work was real.

“He may not be clinically paranoid, but he’s almost certainly narcissistic. He needs to feel special, like he’s fulfilling some grandiose destiny. On bad days, he probably suspects his own inadequacy.”

“And you’re making that diagnosis based on what exactly?”

“Jesus, Ethan, think about it! He wants us to think he’s fighting a clandestine war, that he has a cadre of secret soldiers, that he’s figured out the hypercolony’s weaknesses…”

“Maybe it’s true.”

“It doesn’t feel true. It doesn’t even feel likely. What are you saying, you think he’s completely sane?”

“No. But I’m not sure any of us rises to that standard.” There was nothing left to do but sleep. Ethan turned down the bed, stripped to his underwear and lay down. Nerissa curled up beside him and adjusted the blankets. Within minutes her breathing steadied into a gentle burr.

They had grown accustomed to sharing a bed during the drive to Joplin. Given the circumstances, that hardly represented an erotic opportunity. It was, however, a small reminder that they had never been officially divorced. Separated and effectively divorced, divorced in all but name; nevertheless, he was lying here next to his legally-ordained wife, feeling a different uneasiness than he would have felt with a stranger. He couldn’t suppress all the memories she provoked. She had changed in seven years. But she smelled the same, and he found himself imagining she tasted the same—her mouth, her skin… not a wise thought.

He rolled away from her, toward the window. Nerissa had opened the curtains before she turned in, a habit of hers. She used to say that a view of the sky made her feel less confined. Apparently that was still true. But all Ethan could see was blackness and a few pale stars. Of course his old enemy was up there, too, ethereal and tirelessly observant, as enigmatic and as perversely fascinating as ever. Did he hate the hypercolony the way Beck claimed to? Of course he did. It had taken away everything that mattered to him. It was relentlessly, tirelessly lethal.

The difference was that he knew it didn’t hate him in return. He didn’t believe the hypercolony was capable of that or any other emotion. It had the magnificently indifferent lethality of a poisonous mushroom or a venomous insect.

He hated it, but he respected it. Maybe even admired it.

Would he help Beck exterminate it, if that was possible? Yes. And in the unlikely event they succeeded, he would rejoice. But unlike Beck, unlike Nerissa, he would also grieve for the passing of an extraordinary living thing.

And maybe that made him an unlikely soldier. And maybe Beck had known that about him all along.

19

_{ON THE ROAD}

THEY SET OUT IN A TWO-VEHICLE CONVOY, Eugene Dowd driving the white van and Leo at the wheel of the repainted Ford. Cassie and Thomas chose to ride with Leo, while Beth, to no one’s surprise, elected to ride in the van with Dowd.

Cassie watched the way Leo drove. He was careful to keep the van in sight as they followed the long road from Salina through Great Bend and Dodge City and across the northwestern tip of Texas, out into the dry lands under a flat December sky. If Dowd stopped for gasoline or a bathroom break, Leo would pull in behind him. If Dowd crept too far ahead, Leo would accelerate until the van was back within a comfortable distance. He was as grimly vigilant as a hunting animal.

At first Cassie wondered whether this was because of Beth—because Leo was jealous, in other words. Their relationship had cooled since they left Buffalo, but Leo might still resent Dowd for moving in on his girlfriend. Which Dowd had done as quickly and gleefully as if she had been gift-wrapped and delivered by a generous providence.

But it was more likely the gear in the back of the van Leo was concerned about. Maybe because it had seemed so fragile and incomplete, considered as a weapon. Maybe because it was the only meaningful weapon they possessed.

The highway was one of the flagship federal turnpikes constructed under the Voorhis administration more than fifty years ago, wide and well-maintained. It crossed the desert like a dark ribbon, making silvered oases where hot air mirrored the sky.

After sunset they stopped at a public campground in Arizona. The December evening was cool—cold, now that the stars were out—but they built a fire in a stone-lined pit and roasted hot dogs they had bought at a convenience store outside Tucumcari. Dowd had supplied himself with a six-pack of beer, which he shared with Beth. He talked incessantly, but not about anything serious, and after a few beers he sang a couple of country-and-western songs and encouraged Beth to come in on the choruses. Then he put his arm over Beth’s shoulder and led her toward the canvas tent he had pitched. Beth spared one gloating look for Leo, who refused to meet her eyes.

Cassie made a bed for Thomas in the car: a sleeping bag on the backseat, windows open a crack to let in some air. Then she went to sit beside Leo, who stirred the embers of the dying fire. “Dowd’s an asshole,” she said.

Leo shrugged. “I guess he serves a purpose. My father trusted him. Up to a point, anyway.”

Dowd had expressed his belief that Leo’s father was still alive and that they would meet him somewhere in Mexico or farther south. That was the plan, anyway. The plan had been in place for a couple of years, a private arrangement between Dowd and Werner Beck, and Leo’s arrival had set it in motion.

Cassie tried to ignore the faint but unmistakable sounds of Dowd and Beth making love in Dowd’s tent. She hoped Leo couldn’t see her blushing. To make conversation, or at least a diverting noise, Cassie talked about her family—her original family, back before ’07, and the house they had lived in, what little she could remember of that ancient, fragile world. Leo seemed willing to listen. He even seemed interested. And when Cassie fell silent he stirred the ashes of the fire and said, “I lost my mom when I was five years old. A car accident. I survived, she didn’t. The thing is, I can’t even remember what she looked like. I mean, I’ve seen pictures. I remember the pictures. But her face, looking at me, those kind of memories? Not even in dreams.”

Cassie nodded and moved closer to him.

She shared Leo’s tent that night—chastely, but she was conscious of his long body beside her as he turned in his sleeping bag, the warmth and scent of him hovering under the canvas.

She thought about Beth’s defection to Dowd. It wasn’t really so surprising. Beth was a Society kid, and one thing that marked Society kids was a heightened sense of personal vulnerability. Maybe for that reason, Beth had always been drawn to guys who seemed powerful or protective. Which was how Leo must have seemed to her, back when he was boosting cars and hanging around with petty criminals. But Dowd was older, had traveled farther, was more persuasively dangerous.

Sometime after midnight Cassie snuck out to pee, squatting over the sand behind a mile marker. The highway was empty, the desert a vast silence. A quarter moon leaned into the shoulder of the western mountains. Mexico, she thought. Or somewhere farther south. A rendezvous with Leo’s father. And what then?

In the morning they crossed the Colorado River at Topock and pushed west, heading for what Dowd called a “mail drop” somewhere in Los Angeles. Strange how peaceful the desert seemed, Cassie thought. Something about the sunlight, the solemn authority of it. Then through Barstow, where they stopped at a roadside store and Thomas gawked at a terrarium populated by pea-green lizards, and across the San Gabriels into the Los Angeles basin, the distant city white with gneiss and marble. “Where they make movies,” Thomas said, and yes, Cassie said, Hollywood wasn’t far away, nor were the vast industrial plants that manufactured commercial aircraft, including the planes her little brother excitedly pointed out in the cloudless sky: six-prop passenger aircraft arriving or departing from Los Angeles International Airport, even a few of the new jetliners. The mail drop turned out to be a box-rental place in Vernon, and there was nothing to pick up but a set of export permits and cartage documents that covered the contents of the van—but that was okay, Dowd said; there would be other mail drops along the way, maybe with news from Leo’s father. From there they drove south past thriving farms and olive orchards, road signs not just in English but in Spanish and Japanese, enormous federal aqueducts that soared above the road, seasonal-workers’ housing complexes with stucco facades in rainbow colors. How much of this would survive, she wondered, if the machine in the back of Dowd’s van did what Dowd believed it would do? Because, like any other good and necessary act, destroying the hypercolony might have unintended consequences.

But she thought of her parents as she had last seen them. Murdered, though they were guilty of no crime but the possession of unauthorized knowledge. Her own life distorted, Thomas’s future in doubt… It wasn’t revenge she wanted (though she wanted that too: yes), it was justice. But justice would come at a price. Inevitably. And persons other than herself might be forced to pay it.

On the radio the local stations were playing villancicos: Christmas carols. Los peces en el río. Hoy en la tierra. Ahead, as the afternoon shadows lengthened, Dowd’s van began to slow. They were close to the border now, and they needed a place to stay for the night.

Back in his Kansas garage, Dowd had thrown open the rear doors of the dusty white van and smiled like an impresario. Cassie, peering into that windowless metallic enclosure, had seen what looked like a piece of hand-wired radio gear about the size of a shipping trunk. Leo said, “That’s it?”

“You don’t know what you’re looking at,” Dowd said. “I don’t understand it myself. But it was your daddy who delivered it to me. Your daddy did a lot for me. Bought this garage for me to work and live in. No charge, as long as I was willing to be a soldier when the time came. He delivered this piece of equipment just last summer. Keep it here, he says, and when you get the cue, take it and yourself down to Antofagasta for a meet-up. You showing up, that was the cue. Time to go.”

“All right,” Leo said dubiously. “What’s it do?”

“By itself it doesn’t do anything. It’s part of something bigger. You’re not the only soldier in the army, your daddy told me. Other folks’ll be coming with other kinds of gear. Pieces of a puzzle. Best if you don’t know anything about that. What you don’t know, you can’t tell. But it’s a weapon—part of a weapon. He was pretty clear about that.”

“Doesn’t look like a weapon.”

“I trust your daddy’s judgment,” Dowd said, smirking. “Don’t you?”

They rented two rooms in a Chula Vista motel where fan palms stood like liveried doormen between the swimming pool and the highway. Dowd and Beth took one room, Cassie and Leo and Thomas the other.

Thomas slept on a roll-out by the door. Cassie and Leo shared the double bed. Thomas was a heavy sleeper, fortunately, and Leo turned on the room’s radio at low volume to disguise any other sounds. Noche de paz…, some choir whispered. Todo duerme en derredor.

It was the first time they kissed. It was the first time Cassie touched Leo, the first time she allowed herself to be touched. An exploration, she thought. The exploration of Leo. His mouth tasted of cinnamon and smoke. His hands, she discovered, were generous and wise.

In the morning they gathered in Dowd’s room for a planning session.

“I’ve got ID for myself and a commercial permit for transporting radio gear,” Dowd said, “so I’m good for the border. You all have identification you haven’t used yet, so use it today. Beth can ride with me. But it’s too dangerous to cross in a stolen vehicle, even with new plates and a paint job. So we ditch the car and you guys buy yourselves bus tickets, San Diego to Tijuana. We’ll meet up at the depot on Avenida Revolución. Leo, you still have that pistol you shot a guy with?”

Leo gave Eugene Dowd a cold stare. Beth must have told him the story. “Yes.”

“Give it to me.”

Leo didn’t move, though his eyes darted to the green duffel bag he had carried all the way from Buffalo.

“Come on,” Dowd said. “What are you gonna do, cross the border with a gun in your luggage? That’s just stupid. Give me the pistol and we’ll ditch it along with the car.”

“What if I need to protect myself?”

Beth, standing next to Dowd with a proprietary hand on his arm, said, “You should listen to Eugene. He knows about these things.”

Leo scowled but retrieved the gun from his bag and handed it to Dowd, who checked the safety before tucking it into the waistband of his jeans.

“One other thing,” Dowd said. “I know your daddy gave you my Kansas address, and he told me I should watch out for you if you showed up. That’s fine. That’s part of the deal. But he didn’t say anything about her,” Cassie, “or him,” (Thomas). “And I’m not real happy about looking after children on this junket, especially when we have a few thousand miles of the Trans-American Highway ahead of us.”

“They don’t need you to look after them,” Leo said. “They’re with me.”

“Well,” Dowd said, “leaving them behind isn’t safe either, considering they’re wanted criminals. I suppose we could shoot them.” He smiled to show this was meant as a joke. “But once we’re in Mexico you might fix them up with a little hacienda and a cash stake for the duration. Safer for all of us.”

“No!” Thomas said before Leo could answer.

“Didn’t ask your opinion,” Dowd said.

“They’re with me,” Leo repeated, “at least until I can talk to my father.”

“Yeah, well…” Dowd shrugged. “The next mail drop’s in Mazatlán. I guess they can tag along that far. But then this business gets serious. Everyone clear on that?”

They were all clear.

At the San Ysidro crossing a bored customs agent strolled down the aisle of the Greyhound bus asking desultory questions and examining papers. Cassie sat with Thomas, and for the purpose of the crossing they were brother and sister en route to visit their uncle in Rosarito Beach. The guard gave their documents a cursory look—the Common Passport Accord had made this a formality—and moved on. Neither Cassie and Thomas nor Leo a few rows back, appeared to arouse his suspicion.

The bus idled a little longer in a cloud of diesel fumes, then grunted into motion. Cassie listened to nearby passengers chatting in in Spanish as they passed under the Port of Entry gates and crossed the brown Tijuana River. “You going to Rosarito?” a woman asked her as the bus pulled into the station on Avenida Revolución. “I heard you say.”

Cassie stood to shuffle out, taking Thomas by the hand. “Rosarito, yes.”

“Very nice! Feliz navidad!”

Rosarito, no, she thought. No, we’re not bound for Rosarito Beach. We’re bound for Antofagasta, Chile. We’re bound for the Atacama desert. We’re bound for the end of the world.

20

_{JOPLIN, MISSOURI}

“WE MIGHT BE ABLE TO INTERCEPT THEM in Sinaloa,” Werner Beck said. “Failing that, we’ll meet them in Antofagasta.”

He had explained about Chile, about the facility the hypercolony had supposedly constructed in the Atacama desert, the beams of high-intensity light. He hadn’t seen it himself, but he had talked to an eyewitness, and there was plenty of corroborating evidence: from shipping manifests, from suppliers of industrial parts and rare earths, from inexplicable lacunae in the routes by which commercial aircraft passed from Chile to Bolivia and Brazil. Beck had made a study of it.

The facility in the desert, he insisted, was the hypercolony’s reproductive mechanism. Strike there and you strike at the heart of the beast. Or at least, Nerissa thought, its balls.

Ethan seemed convinced. Nerissa wasn’t, but that didn’t matter. What was important was that she might at last be able to put her arms around Thomas and Cassie and shelter them from Beck’s militant fantasies.

While Ethan was showering she sat in the kitchen with Beck and raised a question that had been troubling her. It was about what the sim Winston Bayliss had said, that there was a parasite at work in the hypercolony, that the hypercolony was divided against itself. Could that be true? If not, why had Bayliss been attacked in Ethan’s farm house by a different party of sims?

“It’s possible,” Beck said. “There are certain signs.”

“Such as?”

“All the cultures from Ethan’s ice cores are identical and compatible. But we’ve cultured fresher strains, and the two samples sometimes compete for resources in vitro until one is eliminated. But I’d hesitate to draw any conclusions from that.”

“Still, what Bayliss said—”

“Nothing a sim says is trustworthy, Mrs. Iverson. And all warfare is based on deception.”

“You’re quoting Sun Tzu.”

“I suppose I am. Of course, what emanates from the hypercolony isn’t even a conscious lie.”

Nerissa’s busy mind turned up a different quote, from Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson: But if he does really think that there is no distinction between virtue and vice, why, Sir, when he leaves our houses let us count our spoons. “So it is possible there could be some kind of internal conflict going on.”

“Sure, but it’s impossible to know.”

Ethan came into the room fully dressed and with his suitcase in hand. “Packed and ready.”

They waited while Beck built a fire in the living-room fireplace and systematically burned the contents of his files, including Dr. Wyndham’s ghastly photographs. Nothing must be left behind to fall into the hands of the enemy.

Beck drove one hundred and fifty miles to the international airport in Kansas City, where he paid for long-term parking in a lot where the car wouldn’t be disturbed for at least three weeks. At the terminal he booked seats on the next available flight to Mazatlán. Not long after dark, a gleaming six-prop aircraft lofted them into

the night sky. Nerissa, sleepless in a window seat, watched prairie towns pass beneath the plane like luminous maps of a world she could no longer inhabit and which her traveling companions had sworn to dismantle. Several times she caught Beck looking at her with an expression she couldn’t quite read—suspicion? Curiosity? As if he wondered what secret motive she might be concealing.

But her motives weren’t secret, not secret at all. Let Beck conduct his war against a hostile abstraction; let Ethan join him, if that was what Ethan wanted to do. She would follow a certain distance down that road. But she was fighting a different war, for a different cause. And maybe Beck understood that truth about her. And maybe that was why she was so frightened of him.

21

_MAZATLÁN

THE MEXICAN HOLIDAYS HAD PREVENTED Eugene Dowd from checking the prearranged mail drop for three days now, and he resented it.

Mazatlán was a pretty town, but the concept of “silent night” was lost on the locals. The Christmas Eve street party had nearly deafened him. Live bands, fireworks, noisy crowds in the Mercado, after which everything shut up tight for Christmas Day. The mail drop was just an ordinary storefront mailbox service on a side street near the Centro Histórico, where Eugene was supposed to check a certain box number before proceeding to Antofagasta. But the business had been consistently closed, nothing to see but a locked door and a cardboard sign on which the words CERRADO POR NAVIDAD were printed in green crayon.

So he had been closeted in a three-story tourist hotel with Beth, Leo Beck, and what he continued to think of as the two kids, Cassie and Thomas. (Cassie wasn’t much younger than Beth, but her flat face and unimpressive figure made her look like a child to Eugene.) He shared his room with Beth, which helped pass the empty hours, but Beth’s charms had already begun to wear thin: she was clingy, easily frightened, and not half as smart as she liked to pretend.

Today Mazatlán was finally open for business. Eugene left the

hotel at ten in the morning and began walking toward the historical part of town, Leo Beck tagging along behind him. Eugene would have preferred to do this alone, but Leo, whose poorly-concealed hostility toward Eugene probably reflected the haste with which he had been dumped by Beth, had insisted on coming with him. And since Leo was Werner Beck’s son—it would be a mistake to forget that—Eugene had grudgingly agreed.

The street was crowded with the local golf-cart taxis called pulmonias, most of them ferrying tourists to and from the Zona Dorada. The sky was faultlessly blue above the brick-and-stucco storefronts, the temperature 70 degrees Fahrenheit and gliding steadily higher. The sheer pleasantness of the day was an invitation to relax, which Eugene was careful to decline. Everything he had seen and done in the Atacama, plus Werner Beck’s lectures on the nature of what he called the hypercolony, had been Eugene’s education in the operating principles of the world. All the pious high-school bullshit about the Century of Peace had been revealed for what it was: as artificial as a plastic nativity scene and as hollow as a split piñata. The world was peaceful the way a drunken coed passed out at a frat party was peaceful: it was the peace that facilitated the fucking. These kids he was traveling with, they claimed to know that; but did they? No. Not the way he knew it.

They were within a block of the mail drop when Leo grabbed Eugene’s arm and said, “Wait, hold on….”

“What is it?”

Leo had come to a full stop and was squinting back down the avenue at the traffic of tourists and locals. Eugene hated being made conspicuous, especially in a strange place when he was in a state of high vigilance, and passing pedestrians were already craning their necks in an instinctive effort to see what ever this excitable turista was gawking at. He wished Leo had inherited even a fraction of his father’s sensible caution.

“Thought I saw someone,” Leo said, sounding a little sheepish now.

“Yeah? Who?”

“I don’t know. A face. A familiar face.”

“Familiar how? Someone you recognize?”

“No. I guess not.” Leo shrugged with obvious embarrassment. “Nobody I could name. Just a feeling, like, you know, I’ve seen that guy somewhere before….”

“A guy?”

“If I had to guess, I’d say an American. Not much of a tan. Forty or fifty years old.”

“Okay,” Eugene said. “I’ll take that under advisement.” Probably it meant nothing. Probably Leo was just nervous. But Eugene was carrying a pistol—the same pistol he had taken from Leo before they crossed the border, and which Eugene had brought into Mexico in a concealed compartment built into the dash of the van. It was tucked into a sling he had made from torn pieces of an old shirt attached to his belt, hidden under the XL tee he had worn to obscure its presence, and he was conscious of its weight.

Eugene’s father had taught him to shoot. The Dowds were farmers from way back, well-acquainted with long guns, but Eugene’s father had also been fascinated by pistols and he’d been an experienced target-shooter. He had owned a fully-registered antique Colt revolver, which he had treasured and which he had eventually used to take his own life after Eugene’s mother lost her fight with pancreatic cancer. Eugene blamed his father’s grief for the suicide, not the weapon. Eugene felt a sentimental attachment to the gun and wished he had inherited it; but he had been in Chile when his father used it to blow a half-dollar-sized hole in his left temple, and the Colt had been handed over to the police for lawful disposal. At the moment Eugene didn’t even have a license to carry. He had applied back in Amarillo, but by that time there were too many DUIs on his record. The laws around gun possession were annoyingly strict even in Texas.

The fact was, Eugene had come back from the Atacama kind of fucked up. How do you process an experience like the one he’d had in the Chilean desert? Finding both his parents dead, his mother of cancer and his father of .45-caliber self-administered euthanasia, had only compounded the problem. For a while it had seemed to Eugene that he was fated to end up a chronic drunk, pissing away his dole money in a secondhand Fleetwood trailer home, and that had been unsettlingly okay with him. The unexpected advent of Werner Beck was what changed everything. Or, no, not Beck himself, though Beck’s can-do attitude was bracing—it was the prospect of taking action, of recalibrating the mysteries of the Atacama as a personal attack and bending himself in the direction of revenge. Of going back to Chile, not as a victim but as a soldier. With other soldiers beside him and a suitable weapon in his hand. That was another promise Beck had made: there would be a weapon, one to which the green-on-the-inside-men and the spiders-with-faces were uniquely vulnerable.

He turned the corner from the avenida into the narrower calle where the mail drop was located. The stores here were doing brisk business, clothes racks and laden tables crowding the sidewalk, catering to tourists who had missed the dense knot of such establishments in the Zona Dorada. Eugene was still rattled by what Leo had said about a familiar face, and he moved cautiously, peering into shop windows as if he were debating the purchase of a seashell necklace or a picture postcard. Windows were useful because their reflections let him scan the passing crowd without being noticed. Leo shifted impatiently from foot to foot as Eugene conducted this methodical surveillance, but that was okay, it was plausible behavior for a young guy who had been, say, dragooned into a shopping expedition when he’d rather be down at the beach. Across the street and half a block away, the CERRADO sign had vanished from the door of the mail drop.

Eugene was about to turn away from the shop-window reflection when he caught sight of someone moving through the throng of tourists with suspicious directness and determination.

The man wore jeans, a denim shirt with the sleeves turned up, a sweat-stained DIABLOS ROJOS baseball cap, and a pair of black-rimmed glasses. None of that distinguished him in any meaningful way from the other locals Eugene had seen. It was his trajectory—a straight line aimed at Leo Beck—and his body language that set off Eugene’s alarms. Not least, the way the man held his right arm stiff at his side. “Leo,” Eugene said.

“What?”

“Leo, you might want to—oh, shit!”

The object the man had been concealing under his right arm was a long-bladed knife. He brought it out and broke into a sprint, closing the distance between them with alarming speed. Eugene whirled, fumbling under his shirt for his pistol.

Meanwhile Leo was still staring at him. Eugene used his free hand to give the kid a shove. Leo stumbled to the left, which was good, because the assailant was within cutting range now and had started a slashing movement that would otherwise have opened Leo’s belly. Eugene managed to haul the handgun out of his trousers and disable the safety just as the man in the baseball cap turned toward him. The tip of the knife found him, a glancing slash that rebounded from his hip bone and felt like the touch of a frigid finger. Eugene leveled the pistol and pulled the trigger.

Eugene had never shot a man, given that the creatures in the Atacama weren’t actually human beings. He looked at the pistol as if it had appeared from some distant dimension. He felt the recoil burning in his wrist. He became aware of the panic that began to spread through the crowd, gasps and shouts, people starting to careen into one another like wobbly bowling pins.

Then he looked at the man he had shot, who had fallen to the sidewalk and was leaking, in addition to blood, a green fluid that smelled like garden fertilizer.

Eugene still hadn’t killed a human being.

“Run,” he told Leo.

Blending into the panicked crowd was relatively easy. Eugene stuffed the pistol under his waistband and pushed through a ring of horrified gawkers, made sure Leo was behind him, then broke into a sprint. Once they were under speed they were indistinguishable from a dozen other tourists whose reaction to the shooting and the sim’s red-green bleed-out had been to dash for safety. After a few uncalculated and therefore usefully random changes of direction, Eugene slowed to a walk and waited for his breathing to return to normal. The injury he had sustained from the sim’s knife was messy and increasingly painful, but so far his jeans were staunching the wound and soaking up the evidence. A cautious reconnaissance revealed no pursuing policías, though he could hear multiple sirens in the distance.

At the hotel, fortunately, Beth and the two kids were killing time in the lobby restaurant; he didn’t have to hunt them down, only herd them back to their room and order them to pack up their gear. Time had become centrally important. The mail drop, no matter what instructions Werner Beck might have left there, had been compromised and was therefore unapproachable. In which case the agreed-upon protocol was to proceed to Antofagasta for the meetup. Maybe there had been some revision to that plan, and maybe Beck had used the mail drop to communicate some such change, but as Eugene’s mother used to say, might and maybe don’t put money in the bank.

Eugene stripped to his shorts. The sim’s knife had pricked him neatly but not deeply, and he allowed Cassie to tape gauze over the wound. She bent to the work with the eyes of a forest animal blinking into the headlights of an oncoming car, but her hands were steady and she didn’t flinch at the blood. He had begun to understand that she was maybe more reliable than Beth and that Cassie’s slightly froglike exterior concealed a capable human being. Not so surprising, then, that Leo had begun poking her on the rebound.

A couple of stitches, even amateur stitches with a sterilized needle and thread from a sewing kit, would probably have been wise. But there wasn’t time for that. Better by far just to get on the road. After Cassie finished taping the bandage she started to pack, hesitating over the contents of her duffel bag as if it mattered whether her underwear was folded. “Just pack the fucking thing!” Eugene snapped. Did she not understand the significance of what had just happened? The dead sim had known Eugene and company were in town and had known where to ambush them. Sims were few and far between, Beck had had once told him, but they were clever and they operated strategically, so there might be more than one of them in Mazatlán—they could be closing in on the hotel at this very moment, an army of them, for all Eugene knew.

“No, stop,” Leo said, which only piqued Eugene’s simmering annoyance.

Leo was staring into Cassie’s bag. He reached past her and pulled out something she had just dropped there: a book.

“Back in the street,” Leo said, “when I thought I recognized someone?”

“Yeah? So? What about it?”

Leo held up the book. It was called The Fisherman and the Spider. There was no fisherman on the creased and soiled cover, but there was a spider—an impressionistic rendering of what Eugene guessed was supposed to be a black widow, judging by the red hourglass on its abdomen. Leo turned the book over and held it close enough for Eugene to see the back. In the lower left-hand corner there was a black-and-white photo of the author, Ethan Iverson, some relation of Cassie’s: a lean-looking guy with a crown of dense gray hair.

“That’s where I saw him before,” Leo explained. “That’s the man I saw before we were attacked.”

Cassie gasped. “He’s here? Uncle Ethan is here?”

“Just fucking pack your bag,” Eugene said. “If he was here, he’s probably on his way to Antofagasta by now. Just like us.”

“But we should try to find him—!”

“We should stick to the fucking plan is what we should do.”

Cassie gave him an angry glare before she relented and went back to filling her duffel with wadded clothes.

Steely little bitch, Eugene thought. More sure of herself than she liked to let on. He would have to keep an eye on her.

22

_{MAZATLÁN, MEXICO / ANTOFAGASTA, CHILE}

“WERE THEY THERE?” NERISSA DEMANDED.

Cassie and Thomas, she meant. Ethan had just come back from the street near the mail drop. He said had been loitering there, watching traffic in the calle before making an approach, when he heard a pistol shot. He had fought his way through the crowd to the place where a wounded sim was dying, oozing fluids onto the sidewalk in front of a tourist shop. But he hadn’t been able to see the attack as it happened. “I don’t know who was involved,” he said.

Could Cassie have been there? Nerissa couldn’t picture her niece with a handgun, but the boy with whom she had left Buffalo, Leo Beck, was probably reckless enough to carry one. “So what do we do?”

“We go on,” Werner Beck said flatly, before Ethan could answer.

So they went on. Because Beck said so. Even though, in Nerissa’s opinion, Werner Beck was subtly mad.

She had been exercising a grim patience, cooperating with Beck because Beck had money for travel and a plan that might re unite her with Cassie and Thomas. Or at least with Beck’s son, Leo. It was possible that every step she took was carrying her farther from her niece and nephew, but it was equally possible (she hoped likely) that she had begun to close in on them—thus her patience.

But Ethan’s news about the killing of a sim unhinged all that studied calm. She wanted to run into the street and look for Cassie and Thomas, wanted to call out their names. She restrained herself from making that or some other stupid and impulsive gesture. Because, at least in this, Beck was probably right. The best they could do was to go to Antofagasta and make the connection there. Because that was where Leo was headed. Assuming no sims interfered. Assuming Cassie and Thomas survived the journey.

And then what? A chilling thought occurred to her: What if Cassie had acquired through Leo a dose of Werner Beck’s madness?

Because it was madness—she was increasingly sure of that.

Beck bought seats on a commercial flight to Santiago with a connection to Antofagasta. Their documents were cursorily examined as they moved through the airport, and the aircraft they eventually boarded was a sleek Fanaero United four-prop liner that stood into the cloudless sky and made a banking turn to the south.

Nerissa longed to discuss her fears with Ethan, but they had enjoyed very little privacy since they had arrived on Werner Beck’s doorstep. She could tell Ethan’s faith in Beck had been shaken by prolonged exposure at close quarters. “He’s not the man I knew ten years ago,” Ethan had admitted when they had a rare moment alone. “But no one else knows what he knows or has his kind of leverage.”

Maybe so, but what had Beck really accomplished? He talked about a worldwide network of researchers and proto-soldiers, all primed to confront the hypercolony and to destroy its facility in the Atacama desert, which was wonderful, and maybe, at a stretch, even plausible, but the details were suspiciously sparse. Beck had offered Wyndham in England as a typical researcher, and he had cited Eugene Dowd, the man Cassie and Leo and Thomas were supposedly traveling with, as a typical soldier. But that hardly constituted an army. And it was little more than speculation on Beck’s part that an attack on the Atacama site, even if it succeeded, would materially damage the hypercolony. There could be other such facilities elsewhere in the world. Beck said not—but pressed to explain his reasoning, he became evasive.

He had been generous with his money over the years, but according to Ethan it was money he had more or less inherited; all Beck himself had done was to create a network of front companies and dummy accounts that allowed him to administer his own income without leaving an obvious electronic trail. And she wondered how secure that income stream really was. Beck’s safe house had been a little shabby, and so was his customary wardrobe of tweed jacket and denim trousers.

None of this amounted to madness, but how should she parse his style of conversation (mannered and condescending), his monomania, his obsessive attention to the minutiae of privacy and security? All the surviving families of the victims of ’07 shared these traits, to one degree or another, but at least they had tried to build lives outside the boundaries of their necessary paranoia. Beck was entirely enclosed by it. Even Ethan, whose isolation in his Vermont farmhouse had been nearly as complete as Beck’s, had managed to retain his sanity—maybe because he was objective enough to question it. Beck allowed himself no such unmanly doubts.

And that was the crux of the matter. Beck was impervious to doubt. He believed in his army of followers, his implacable enemy, and his invincible strategy; and to question any of that was not only stupid but, in Beck’s eyes, a betrayal so heinous as to be unforgiveable.

Ethan, dozing next to the window, had left Nerissa with instructions not to wake him. The flight attendant served lunch as the plane curved over the Pacific west of Panama, but it was typical airline fare; he wasn’t missing anything. She found her attention drawn to Beck’s tray as he ate—the way he tugged the foil cover from the tray and folded it in thirds, likewise the wrapper from which he had extracted the cutlery. He took a sip from his thimble-sized cup of black coffee after every four bites. She counted. Four bites. Sip. Four bites. Sip. It was metronomic.

“What are you looking at, Mrs. Iverson?”

She jerked upright like a guilty schoolgirl. “Nothing… sorry.”

Beck glanced at Nerissa’s tray, now a clutter of torn packaging and half-eaten food. “The attendant should be around shortly to pick that up.”

She forced a smile and hoped it would end the conversation. Beck shifted his gaze to her face, but his expression of disgust hardly changed. “Since we have a moment, can I say something?”

“Of course.”

“I want to put this to you directly. Bluntly. Because it’s obvious you’re skeptical about what I mean to do in Chile.”

“I wouldn’t say—”

“All you want to do is reclaim your niece and nephew. And I have no problem with that. You’re not a soldier, and neither is Cassie or Thomas. If they’re in the company of Leo, they’re only an impediment to his work. Taking them back to the States is probably the most useful service you could perform.”

Wake up, Ethan! Nerissa thought. But Ethan didn’t stir. The plane lurched through a patch of turbulent air and she reached out to steady her coffee cup.

“But you’re wrong about what we’re doing in the Atacama. Others have expressed similar reservations. I’ve heard the argument for accommodation more often than I care to remember, though less often since 2007—the idea that the hypercolony has given us something valuable in exchange for a trivial diversion of resources. The idea that interfering with that puts both parties at risk and even constitutes a threat to world peace. I have to say, it’s a contemptible attitude.”

“I saw my sister and her husband murdered. I’m not inclined to forgive that.” Where was the flight attendant? The entire plane seemed to have been enveloped in a kind of sunny afternoon coma.

“I know. But you’ve wondered, haven’t you, what we stand to lose if I’m successful?”

Sure she had wondered. If it was true that the hypercolony had molded the world the way a potter works wet clay on a wheel—if it had actually coaxed prosperity out of poverty and made a tractable chorus of the world’s discordant human voices—then yes: “Of course I wonder about the consequences.”

“As I see it, humanity will be forced to take responsibility for its own future.”

“For better or worse.”

“All of us who survived 2007 bear a heavy burden. People around us are allowed to go about their lives, while we carry this unspeakable knowledge. So we try to cope. We do what we have to do. You’ve elected to stand back and look after the children while others fight. That’s your choice, and it’s a good and useful one. But as a civilian, the consequences of what we do are not your concern. You need to let the soldiers fight the war.”

Between planes at Pudahuel Airport they sat in a lounge nursing drinks—mineral water for Beck, beer for Ethan, rum and Coke for Nerissa. She passed the hour between flights listening to an English-language news broadcast on a TV set behind the bar.

Was the control of the hypercolony already faltering, as Winston Bayliss had suggested? More Russian and Japanese troops and gunships had been dispatched to Magadan on the Sea of Okhotsk. There was footage of brick buildings collapsing under mortar fire. Such outbreaks were not altogether unknown and were usually tamped down as soon as they started, but this one might be different. The diplomatic saber-rattling continued to intensify and the League of Nations seemed helpless to intervene. Shattered walls, broken bodies: was that what the world would look like in five or ten or fifty years?

She stole another glance at Beck. Give him his props, Nerissa thought. He was a clever and persuasive salesman. As toxic and as fraudulent as his worldview might be, he had successfully peddled it to a number of intelligent people, apparently including Ethan.

In other words, he was a natural leader. But maybe that was what had made the last century so peaceful: an enforced vacation from natural leaders. And if the hypercolony were destroyed they would come storming back—our Napoleons, she thought. Our Caesars. Our terrible and rightful rulers.

A smaller single-prop plane carried them from Santiago to Antofagasta, and as it bent down to the Cerro Moreno runway strip she caught her first glimpse of the coastal mountains that bordered the high salt desert of the Atacama.

The driest place on Earth. More than forty thousand square miles of sand, salt and ancient pyroclastic debris. A great place to put an observatory, if anyone had been funding observatories, because the skies were so consistently clear.

It was the place (if Beck was to be believed) in which the hypercolony had built its breeding ground. She tried to imagine that entity, to think about it without hatred or fear. Perhaps the way Ethan thought of it, as an organism of great age and complexity. It was intelligent, Ethan and Beck believed, but not self-aware. It didn’t think, in human terms, but it calculated. It was like the computers the utility companies used, but infinitely more subtle, programmed by its own unfathomably long evolutionary history.

And out there in the Atacama it had assembled some means to deliver itself to new, distant worlds. Using rockets, maybe, like the ones in the paperback science-fiction novels Cassie used to jam into her schoolbag, or something better than rockets. Something to do with beams of light. Something that could be constructed only with the resources of a technologically adept culture.

If you looked at it that way the hypercolony wasn’t really an enemy, at least in the sense of a malevolent, conscious opponent. And maybe that was what Beck had failed to understand. There was no more malice in the hypercolony than there was in a natural disaster… and it wasn’t even necessarily a disaster, Nerissa thought, except for those of us who, like willful children, poked our fingers into the lethal business of the hornet’s nest.

Antofagasta was a busy industrial city. Copper refineries and cement factories etched parallel lines of smoke on the northern sky; a huge port dominated the harbor. Nerissa, Ethan and Beck took a taxi from the airport to a three-bedroom row house on the fringe of the hotel district.

Night had fallen by the time they finished unpacking. Ethan turned on the TV, and a Televisión Nacional newscast began to repeat what Nerissa already knew about the fighting in Magadan. She crossed the street to a tiny Líder store and exchanged some of the pesos they had bought at the airport for basic groceries. Back in the kitchen she fried fish and vegetables for three but ended up eating very little of it herself. Her appetite had been fragile since she left Buffalo and she had lost a few pounds already.

There was no evidence of the army Beck had said would be waiting for him. No cryptic messages, no hooded partisans knocking at the door. When she asked him about that, Beck said he’d contact “some people” tomorrow. And Nerissa carefully refrained from rolling her eyes.

She and Ethan shared a bedroom. What made this especially unsettling was that to night might be one of their last nights together. Sooner or later Ethan would be off to the interior of the Atacama, Sancho Panza to Beck’s Quixote, and with any luck she’d be back in the States with her niece and nephew. She might not see Ethan again even if he survived. She wanted him to survive, of course, but did she want something more than that? How much of their shipwrecked marriage might it be possible to salvage? If they were together under less dire circumstances, if they were granted time enough to discover what they had become after seven years of separation… what might be possible?

He opened the curtains and turned down the bed. Nerissa repeated some of what Beck had said on the airplane and asked Ethan bluntly whether he still believed in Beck’s plan.

Ethan frowned. Even that small gesture was hauntingly familiar. The creases at the corners of his eyes. The buckled V between his brows. “I think it has a chance.”

“So you buy all that stuff about radio waves?” Nerissa understood the concept only vaguely, but Beck claimed to have isolated key frequencies at which the orbital cloud of the hypercolony communicated with itself. He believed he could disrupt those signals—not globally, but locally, at the Atacama site. Which would have the effect of isolating the Atacama facility from the orbital hypercolony. Which would render the resident simulacra inert, perhaps even kill them. Supposedly.

“It wasn’t just Beck who did the research. If he can suppress activity at the site long enough, then yeah, we can get inside and damage it. Whether that will have any lasting effect is hard to say. It depends on which theory of the hypercolony’s life cycle you accept.”

“So even if it works, nothing might happen.”

“I’m pretty sure something will happen.”

“But the hypercolony might have a way of defending itself.”

“Also possible.”

“But you think it’s worth doing?”

He shrugged.

Lying in bed, exhausted but sleepless, she found herself recalling a film Ethan had shown her years ago. A home movie, basically, made by one of his undergraduate students during a research trip to Japan. Ethan had been working with a nest of Asian giant hornets, insects that were also called “yak-killers”—the species was responsible for an average of forty human deaths every year. This particular nest was in a forest close to a settled community in Kanagawa Prefecture, and it would have to be destroyed once Ethan had secured specimens. Ethan approached the nest in protective clothing as carefully sealed as a diving suit. His face through the plastic visor looked tense but not frightened, and his movements were calculated, deliberative. Respectful was the word that came to mind.

As he approached the nest it detected his presence and reacted to it. Dozens of wasps swarmed out and darted directly at him. The camera wavered but the cameraman stood his ground; two of Ethan’s other students panicked and ran. Ethan did not. Even as the fist-sized hornets clustered on his visor, struggling with the selfless lethality of a suicide bomber to reach his face, he went about his work. And when he was done taking samples, he poisoned the nest with the same impersonal efficiency.

She woke an hour before dawn from a terrible dream. In the dream Ethan had been back in Japan, but the hornets were as big as people and they had faces like the face of Winston Bayliss. She came to herself (I came to myself in a dark wood where the straight way was lost) convinced she had heard some ominous noise, but when she went to the window there was no one in the alley behind the house, only a cat digging through a drift of refuse. “Don’t go,” she said.

She wasn’t sure whether she meant to wake him. She heard him turn over in the bed.

“Don’t go. The only reason you can’t see how crazy this is is that we’ve been neck-deep in crazy for years. Beck is delusional. There is no army. He doesn’t know what’s out there in the desert or where it came from or what it wants or how it can hurt you. Don’t go.”

Enough of the ambient light of Antofogasta seeped through the window that she could see his head against the pillow, eyes closed. She assumed he was asleep, but he startled her by saying, “Come back to bed.”

“Ethan?”

He didn’t move. Maybe he still wasn’t altogether awake. “I don’t have a choice, Ris.” His voice thick, words like an extended sigh. “This is what I have to do. There’s nothing else. Come back to bed.”

The cat pricked its ears and chased something invisible down the alley and out of sight. Nothing else moved. The air itself seemed sterile and empty. Then I’ll find my own way home, she thought.

23

_{CROSSING THE EQUATOR}

THEY FOLLOWED THE HIGHWAY IN TWO vehicles: Eugene Dowd’s white van, with Dowd and Beth in it, and a sky-blue Ford Concourse Dowd had rented with the promise that he would return it to the rental agency’s Valparaiso branch. Cassie took turns at the wheel with Leo, occasionally checking the mirror to see if they were being followed.

The Trans-American Highway was an advertisement for the success of the Pan-American Common Market. It passed through some of the hemisphere’s most rugged and beautiful terrain, and it was a feat of large-scale multinational engineering to rival the Channel Tunnel, the Danyang–Kunshan Bridge, or the Jordanian desalinization towers. Under other circumstances Cassie might have relished the trip. As it was, her connection with Leo Beck made it at least bearable.

Had she adapted to Leo, or was it the other way around? But it seemed to Cassie that there was no compromise in their unfolding relationship, only a series of surprising discoveries. Cassie had been with boys before, on what she preferred to think of as an experimental basis. Well, two boys. There had been Rudy Sawicki from high school, a math prodigy with bad skin who was nevertheless sweet and gently lascivious when they were alone together. But he wasn’t Society, and their relationship had collapsed under the weight of unspeakable truths. And there had been Emmanuel Fisher, whom everyone called Manny: he was Society, and for a year they had seen each other every weekend. But the closer she got to Manny, the more he felt entitled to make decisions on her behalf or to overrule decisions she had made. Eventually, after a trivial argument about homework, he had called her a bitch and thrown her copy of Wuthering Heights against the wall so ferociously that the school librarian complained about the broken spine. By mutual consent, they hadn’t dated after that.

From a distance Leo Beck had seemed like just another nervy, chain-smoking Society boy. Undoubtedly that was what Beth had imagined him to be. (Cassie was tempted to wonder what Leo had seen in Beth, but that was a mean thought.) So it had surprised her to learn that Leo was a habitual reader; it had surprised her to see how easily he related to Thomas. In bed, during the few but precious opportunities they shared during the drive south, Leo was gentle when she wanted him to be and fiercely eager at exactly the right moment—and he was good company afterward. With Leo beside her she could sleep soundly, even in a dark room in a strange country. As her eyes closed he kissed her ear or her forehead and whispered, “Sleep well.” Simple, comforting words. She cherished them. You too, she thought. Sleep well, Leo.

The Trans-American Highway crossed the Darien Peninsula on the Pacific side of the peninsula’s mountainous spine. Often she could see the highway winding ahead of them, a high steel ribbon where it spanned marshes and gorges or hugged rocky scarps, though as acts of engineering the tunnels were even more impressive, cutting through massive rock-faces as cleanly as a bullet. As the day approached noon Dowd signaled his intention to pull over at the next rest stop, which turned out to be a wide space at the side of the road featuring a cafeteria, four pumps marked GASOLINA SINPLOMO, a gift shop, and a view that rivaled anything Cassie had ever seen in Aunt Ris’s back issues of National Geographic.